When the financial crisis hit, for example, the monthly quits rate in the US fell from about 2.2 per cent in 2007 to 1.2 per cent in 2009. In the UK, the number of people quitting their jobs fell more than half.
But after the recession ended, people’s willingness to quit their jobs took an unusually long time to recover. In both the US and the UK, it took until 2016 before the number of quitters returned to pre-recession levels.
UK quitting behaviour levelled off at that point even though the jobs market boomed and the unemployment rate fell to the lowest since the 1970s.
Data on other countries is hard to find, but the Australian Treasury identified a similar phenomenon of puzzlingly depressed job-switching behaviour in a paper in 2019.
WHEN PEOPLE QUITTING MAY BOOST THE ECONOMY
This matters because job quitters might not just be a barometer of economic health — some economists believe they are a driver of it.
People who leave jobs voluntarily for new ones tend to move up the career ladder into roles that better utilise or develop their skills. UK data shows median hourly earnings growth for job changers was 7.3 per cent in 2018 compared with 3 per cent for people who stayed in their jobs.
Credit: Source link
