When the pandemic first hit, Celeste Lyons quit her job at a law firm in Connecticut and started to hunker down at home, living off retirement savings and an inheritance from her parents as she tried to avoid getting sick. She wanted to work again eventually, but nearly two years went by before Lyons, 63, started a new gig as a real estate analyst—a position that allows her to work from home when Covid cases spike.
“I got tired of spending my retirement money. I thought, ‘I’ve got to pad my account,’ ” Lyons says of her decision to return to work. Plus, she adds, during all that time at home, “I just got bored out of my skull.”
Lyons is among millions of Americans who dropped out of the labor force amid the coronavirus pandemic and spent months grappling with whether and how to return to work as fears of the virus abounded, the country’s child-care system collapsed, and the ad hoc nature of work-from-home policies sparked a nationwide reckoning over what type of work—and pay—people were willing to accept. Generous federal stimulus and unemployment benefits, at the same time, were providing a bonus source of income for many.
But with Americans’ fears of the coronavirus falling, schools returning to in-person instruction, and surplus savings dwindling, some of the most significant factors fueling what has become known as the Great Resignation are starting to ease. The result is a small but significant bump up in the labor-force participation rate over the past six months and a slowdown in the share of Americans quitting their jobs—two dynamic economists expect to accelerate as the labor market, like much of US society, lumbers toward a postpandemic normal.
After months of barely any improvement, the labor-force participation rate has been rising since the fall and even more quickly in recent months, climbing 0.4 percentage point in the three months ended in February as 1.87 million people rejoined the labor force. That’s triple the 621,000 who returned in the three months prior.
Perhaps the most prominent official indication that the tides may be shifting was the recent release of Labor Department data showing the percentage of workers who quit their jobs in January had slowed to 2.8%, down from 3% in each of the two previous months.
And that trend likely continued into February as well, according to data from Gusto, a payroll processor that works with more than 200,000 companies and releases data on monthly “quits” faster than the government can. Among workers on Gusto’s cloud-based platform, the share who quit their jobs slowed 0.6 percentage point between January and February to 3.1%, the data show, matching the same rate as February 2020, just before the pandemic hit.
“We’re kind of at this point where the resignation is a continued presence in the economy,” Gusto economist Luke Pardue told Barron’s“but it isn’t likely going to be a much larger presence in the coming months.”
Improvement in labor-force participation and the country’s quits rate will be due in no small part to the pandemic itself fading, at least for now, bringing down Americans’ concerns over catching Covid along with it. Three in four Americans say they are ready for the country to open up, an
Ipsos
poll from mid-March found, and more than half say they have either returned to their normal routines already or will do so within the next six months. And the share of Americans who see the virus as a “severe” local risk is down to a record low of 17%, the polling firm Morning Consult found.
That helps clear the way for Covid-cautious Americans like Lyons to return to work as they start to feel safer on their commute or in the office.
“It does feel—at least psychologically—like Omicron was just this breaking point for many people, where it feels like you can’t avoid” the virus, says Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America with the job-search site Indeed . “There’s this re-engagement period.”
Schools are reopening for in-person teaching, too, as Covid case numbers fall and restrictions are lifted, a shift that has allowed more working parents—and particularly mothers—to return to work full time.
As of September, the employment rate for mothers of young children was 3.4 percentage points below its prepandemic level, while the same rate for women without younger children was 2.3 percentage points below. But mothers have been returning to work since then faster than their peers, according to Bunker’s analysis of Labor Department microdata, and their recovery rate now stands roughly equal to that of men and women without younger children. Continued improvement there would boost overall participation while signaling that the barriers holding back the return to work for many Americans are easing.
Accelerating the return as well is the spending down of excess savings, which had ballooned during the pandemic but which, for households in the lower 40% of the income distribution, are likely now gone, at the same time that the cost of living is soaring . AT
Moody’s
analysis in January estimated those households had close to $350 billion in excess personal savings—but forecast those would be gone by the end of this month. “The financial pressure to return to work will be strong,” wrote Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
For wealthier Americans, recent volatility in the stock market may have dealt the heavier blow, hitting investments and 401(k) accounts while testing the resilience of the new crop of day-traders, who had been supplementing their incomes with apps like
robinhood
.
The share of retired workers returning to work has risen sharply in the past two months, a possible indication of Americans looking to bolster their retirement savings.
Scott Williams left his government job working in aviation out of Jacksonville, Fla., in February of last year, cashing out $50,000 worth of stock and planning to retire early while he hung out with his children and played golf. But within six months Williams, now 50, found himself growing tired of the quiet, and his old colleagues started asking him to come back. His stock portfolio, meanwhile, “started just going downhill, downhill,” he says, and he returned to his post almost exactly a year after he’d left.
Retirement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, Williams says. “It’s nice not having to go to work—but what are you going to do?”
Perhaps most simply, after a record 48 million Americans quit their jobs last year, the Great Resignation may be starting to slow because the workers who most wanted to head for the exits have already left, economists say. While 29% of workers are actively looking for a new job, according to a Grant Thornton workforce survey to be released in April, that’s down from 33% who were actively looking in October.
“Some of the shuffling is over—people made their moves and found better jobs and better pay,” says Zandi, the Moody’s economist. “I don’t think they want to move every six months or a year. I think they’ll settle in.”
Write to Megan Cassella at megan.cassella@dowjones.com
.
0