The Great Resignation produced individual exit rather than collective worker power

Evidence

While workers in certain sectors have become more militant, the Great Resignation—the wave of job quitting that swept through the tight US labor market in particular in 2021—did not lead to a direct collective assertion of worker power. Instead, as sociologist Daniel Zamora puts it, this gave rise to a politics of individual exit. Thanks in part to government support, many workers left their jobs during and after COVID, searching for higher pay and a better work-life balance. But demands for workplace democracy and control over the production process, still commonplace in the 1970s, barely surfaced. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 102

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete instance of ‘everything politicized, nothing organized’: worker leverage rising without collective assertion — the hyperpolitics diagnosis in miniature. — connects to: Widespread individual exit strategies undermine collective mobilization and perpetuate subordinate status. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 2747; Union decline removed a shared psychic and political infrastructure for workers — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1647; Escaping society through withdrawal itself creates higher status — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 297