The Great Resignation

I received some marketing guff from a recruitment company hoping to assist my business during 'The Great Resignation'.

In the anodyne, 'more tea vicar?', exquisitely apolitical sense that many people feel is the only appropriate register for LinkedIn I wish them and all employers good luck and insights in these trying times and thank my correspondent for her offer of help.

But to be more direct and linguistically sensitive about it....

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‘By now, you’ve probably heard of the Great Resignation.’

You say that as though it exist as do stones and clouds and lizards. Rather than just being a string of words concocted to put a spin on a phenomenon the character of which perhaps should cause us alarm. Is it ‘great’? Are people ‘resigning’?

‘Around the world,…’

Ah. Spin. No it is not ‘around the world’. It is strictly limited to those jurisdictions where centuries of imperialist exploitation have accumulated and made available sufficient private wealth to be extracted in taxation and redeployed as government largesse to create a power base of helpless, powerless people entirely dependant on the dominant political class.

In the rest of the world (that would be most of it) if you don’t work, you don’t eat. The only difference between them and us is the time lag to starvation. We happen to have plenty of padding and it is being scooped up by the 1%.

‘…millions of people are quitting their jobs and pursuing new opportunities, informed by lessons learned since the start of the pandemic.’

Really? 'Opportunities'? The main lesson learned is that the government will pay you to sit down and not work.

The lesson they have yet to learn is that every dollar they use to this end diminishes the value of all the other dollars and increases the listed price of everything.

‘…uncertainty cemented most employees in place, anxious to see what the future would hold.’

That is true, to some degree, of all employment at any time.

‘For many, the pandemic prompted a shift in focus. Billions of people were forced to reflect on their lives, their careers, their wellbeing, and how these three major facets of their lives interact.’

Billions were also guided to reflect on anything but how government policies were destroying economies and lives.

‘Values, priorities, and personal goals came to the fore, and millions realised that their roles didn’t quite fit in as well as they’d thought.’

Billions are perhaps realising that the power of their values, priorities, and personal goals has been crushed to dust beneath the ill-considered and bull-headed lockdowns.

The rest of the article goes on to urge employers to rediscover the humanity of the people they employ, to maintain a psychologically healthy workplace, respect mental health, empower people, provide flexibility, make them feel valuable and not just cogs in a machine, find out what makes them tick and what drains them, remove bottlenecks to allow individuals to work more easily, reliably, and accessibly and so on and on.

I already do these things. Most employers do. The problem is that the government is doing none of these things.

I want the government to get the hell out of the way of people who want to freely exchange their labour, expertise and passion for other people’s money. This so-called ‘Great Resignation’ is just a slogan to cover up a disastrous and unintended consequence of government interference in a market economy.