Something wonderful happened during the past year. After coming out of the pandemic and with the world opening up again, people started leaving their jobs for better ones.
They’ve been calling it “The Great Resignation”, as huge masses of people who were working mundane jobs – often in the service sector – have said “Enough” and started work elsewhere. So people who were flipping burgers, serving complex coffee orders, and waiting tables, who previously were called “essential workers” during the pandemic but were treated like crap by customers and management, realized they could make more working at Amazon or some other warehouse or office position. Even people who felt were paid and/or treated lowly at their modest positions found better work and/or pay with other companies desperate to fill those vacancies.
Now, to be fair, a lot of those people quitting during “The Great Resignation” weren’t looking for better work. They were older people who simply had enough of the crap and were able to retire. But their departures still gave great opportunities for others to take their place with more pay than before.
But now comes the pushback from Big Corporate and Big Business in general. Being forced to pay people more to keep their jobs or to hire new people, they’re trying to stop the trend from going on. Or, worse yet, watch as it becomes a global phenomenon.
Thus, they came up with... “The Great Regret”.
“The Great Regret” is this idea that all those people who quit their old jobs and found new ones will now “regret” their decision, thinking the grass on the “other side” really isn’t greener, and would be begging on their hands and knees for their old jobs, weeping for their former bad employers for forgiveness and to take them back.
Essentially this is a capitalist fantasy. The child that vows to hold their breath until they turn blue and then “you’ll be sorry! You’ll see!”
“The Great Regret” was the brainchild of business “experts” a few months ago, but it wasn’t long before it went out to the air-fluffed ego-driven media, most of them owned by big corporations. According to one of their many polls to reinforce this, one in five people who quit their old jobs would supposedly “regret” the decision. “One in five!”
Yeah, “one in five” is just twenty percent. That means that eighty percent of the people who left their old jobs for new ones have no regrets.
“One in five” is not “great”. “One in five” is pathetic. “Four out of five” would be “great”.
Let’s get brutally honest here... “The Great Regret” is not “great”. It’s a great crock of crap.
What you have here are corporate-owned media and capitalist interests spreading a false narrative, using polls and surveys that they can control and easily manipulate to try to head off this trend of employees leaving the workplace for better jobs and friendlier environments. A trend that has not stopped and has continued as long as there are jobs to be needed.
For the longest time, businesses large and small have been able to underpay their employees and treat them like crap because the marketplace allowed them to. Since the late 1970’s, the Economic Policy Institute says that real wages for most Americans have been stagnant, not even keeping up with rising costs and inflation. That’s because jobs were always considered scarce, especially during economic hard times. During the Great Recession, people who were laid off took whatever jobs were available because jobs were hard to come by. Employers have always had the power. And during the Great Recession, “too big to fail” corporations who were getting bailouts were paying bonuses to the execs that caused the problem because they were deemed “top talent”, while millions of hard-working Americans were finding themselves out of work and on the verge of being out of their homes.
But with the global pandemic, when a greater emphasis was placed on warehouse and deliveries, suddenly the demand for different and better-paying jobs became a thing. Now the workers have options. They don’t have to stay with a low-paying job that treats them like crap.
In many ways, “The Great Resignation” is also a “Great Revolt”, as workers suddenly have the power to get away from their conditions if they so choose for better jobs. That doesn’t mean that things will be better for every worker who makes that decision. Obviously if you don’t do your due diligence and look into that potential “better” job before accepting it, you may feel some regret, but that happens with any job you apply for. There is nothing “great” about that.
The only real “Great Regret” going on are the employers who have shortchanged their employees and took them for granted. Now they have to address that if they want to keep their true “top talent”.
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