With the upheaval of the Covid pandemic came opportunity, as a shift in the labor market gave workers unprecedented opportunities for mobility and a chance to climb the pay scale.
The Great Resignation, as it came to be known, saw record amounts of employees quit, leaving for better opportunities as companies couldn’t hire workers fast enough to fill the vacancies that the pandemic helped create. A record 4.5 million left their jobs for greener pastures in March 2022.
But that is changing.
The level of “quits” as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has contracted by nearly one-third since hitting its peak in early 2022, a period during which job openings have nearly halved.
One metric helps further tell the story: During the same period, the disparity between average annual pay increases for those staying in their jobs against those leaving has all but collapsed, going from a peak of 8.4 percentage points in April 2022 to 1.9 percentage points in January, the lowest level since payrolls processing firm ADP began tracking the data in November 2020.
