[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, Ben Casselman, who writes about business and the economy for The New York Times. Maybe you saw his recent piece called The Great Resignation is Over. Can Workers' Power Endure? It comes at an interesting time with the TV and movie actors and writers on strike. Of course, UPS workers poised to possibly walk out by the end of the month, and inflation easing a little more than expected last month.

The job market largely strong but rents sky high in the New York context especially, and retail jobs among those still taking the biggest pandemic year a hit, those kinds of jobs. President Biden planning a second speech this week on what he calls Bidenomics, hoping Americans see his administration as an economic success story as he runs for reelection. We'll tie all these things together as much as we can and take your calls with Ben Casselman from the Times. Ben, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC today.

Ben Casselman: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Remind us, what did we mean by the great resignation, and then tell us why you think it's over.

Ben Casselman: I think there are actually a lot of misconceptions about what it was. What it was, which we all agree on, I think was this enormous wave of people quitting their jobs in the 2021, 2022 period. We saw just an enormous wave of people quitting. I think that the common misconception there is that this was people quitting to go sit on the beach, or reevaluate their lives in the wake of the pandemic, or travel the country. That really isn't what it was. What it really was by the numbers is mostly people changing jobs, in some cases to go and start a business or to go change industries, maybe deciding they don't want to work in the service sector anymore.

A lot of it was people changing jobs within industries, staying in their same line of work but just going to jobs that paid them better or offered them better working conditions. It was driven by this real moment of worker power, this moment where there was a lot of demand for work coming out of the pandemic. We all went back to restaurants, to travel, and all of a sudden we needed workers to fill those jobs. That gave workers some real leverage and they took advantage of that leverage to demand better pay, better conditions and to a substantial degree, they got it.

The question now is what happens as that fades. We see in the government data that the rate at which people are quitting their jobs is getting close to where it was before the pandemic. In some of these industries, it's already all the way back down to where it was. Of course, we hear the talk of recession. We hear about layoffs in some sectors.

You start to wonder whether this is a fading of that power if workers who have made these gains are going to be able to hold onto them as the economy slows, or certainly if we do at some point head into a recession.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if this sounds like it applies to you, help us report this story. Were you a part of what came to be known as The Great Resignation? Call and tell us a little bit about your story, how it may have improved, let's say, the balance of power between you and whoever your current or next employer may have been. If you're an employer, does it seem to be ending right now? Does the power seem to be shifting back toward employers as the pandemic emergency has eased?

Whether that's a coincidence or pandemic-related explicitly 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or anything else you want to say or ask about business or trends in the economy right now with Ben Casselman who reports on business and the economy for The New York Times. 212-433-WNYC. Are you seeing inflation ease in your life or in your sector of business?

If it's in a professional context or anything else you want to help us report or ask about, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Ben, to the point of your article that the great resignation appears to be ending, you define that as the rate at which workers voluntarily quit their jobs falling sharply in recent months, though it edged up a little bit in May. What industries do you see it in mostly and what does it say about the balance of power between workers and owners?

Ben Casselman: At the peak, we really were seeing it across the board. It really was hitting pretty much every industry, pretty much every level of work. I think that we sometimes made a mistake of focusing on the white-collar experience. Many of us in the media are in that world ourselves, and it was easy to project that out. We all came through the pandemic feeling like we needed a break. I think maybe we sometimes thought that that's what was mostly going on here. The real driving force of this was in lower-wage work, especially in the service sector, leisure and hospitality, restaurant workers, hotel workers, folks in the travel industry, retail workers.

That's where we really saw this huge wave of quitting get the highest. That's where I think this was most driven by this worker-power moment. You did have a lot of people who reevaluated things coming out of the pandemic and said that they didn't want to do that kind of work. We provided assistance that made it easier for people to be a little bit choosier about the jobs that they took. Then demand coming out of the shutdown period was so intense that we needed a ton of these workers. That's what really gave this moment of power. That's what I think seems to be fading now.

In leisure and hospitality, the rate of quitting has actually come back down to pretty much where it was before the pandemic. Now, the pre-pandemic period was a decent moment in the economy in a lot of ways, but I don't think it's what anybody would point to as a super hot moment when workers were making these huge gains. I should say we've really had an impressive period here where wages for workers at the bottom of the pay scale have risen really rapidly. We've actually seen some narrowing of inequality during this period, which is something we really haven't experienced in this country in 40 years.

Brian Lehrer: Can you mention some sectors where that has been the case, especially?

Ben Casselman: Leisure and hospitality is the biggest place where we've seen really substantial-- the last time I looked, pay for restaurants and hotels was up average hourly earnings were up something like 28% over just a two-year period. Now, these are still not jobs that are paying tremendously well. We were seeing this phenomenon of signing bonuses to go and work at McDonald's. We were seeing Walmart and Target announcing nationwide minimum wages pushing up towards $15 an hour. These were really substantial gains among a group of people that had not seen significant wage gains in a really long time.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from Eli in Paris, France, but I think he lives here and wants to talk about conditions here. Eli, you're on WNYC. Hello from New York.

Eli: Hello from Paris. Thank you for taking my call. My question is about the job market. It seemed like for a long time, the balance of power had shifted from the employer to the job seekers, with job seekers being more demanding about their requirements from their employers. Has that balance of power shifted back to the employers-- to the companies?

Brian Lehrer: Ben?

Ben Casselman: It's a great question. I think yes to a degree. We are not seeing those signing bonuses to go work at McDonald's in the same way. We're hearing from employers that they're having an easier time filling jobs, and anytime they're having an easier time, that means that they can set the terms a little bit more, employers can. On the other hand, the unemployment rate in this country is still historically low. There's still a lot of job openings out there. We're still hearing from employers that it's not easy to fill jobs, even if it's a little bit easier. I don't think we can say that the balance of power has swung all the way back.

I think, Brian, you mentioned at the outset, the writers' strike but also the looming potential UPS strike. We've seen unionization activity at Amazon and at Starbucks, at companies where that was never looking likely in the past. That is a suggestion that this moment has not yet passed us by. I think the really big question looking ahead is whether it can continue if the economy weakened significantly. If the unemployment rate starts to come up more--

If most of what's happening here has been driven by workers going to their bosses and saying, "If you don't give me a raise, I'm going to go next door." What happens when the employer says, "Okay, fine. Go next door. We don't need you anymore"? This has been a moment that has been driven by this mismatch between supply and demand. If that changes, then workers are inevitably going to lose some of that influence.

Brian Lehrer: I want to come back in a minute to the prospect of a UPS strike and how that might intersect with one of the trends in employment, at least in the New York area and I think nationally, and that is that retail sector employment is still so far down. I think that's because of so much continued online shopping compared to in stores relative to before the pandemic. First, let me take another caller, Nucera, in South Orange. You're on WNYC. Hi, Nucera.

Nucera: Hi. I am an educator. I've worked in the education system on the East Coast and the West Coast for over two decades. I left the education system because, as I said to the rep that answered the phone, it really wreaks havoc on one's mental health. I love teaching. I'm passionate about teaching critical thinking to middle and high schoolers, but it seems that whether you're on the East Coast or the West Coast, administrators, they want teachers to do more with less. I was also a coach to support teachers and a mentor, and there's just so much lacking, but the desire to have teachers do more with less continues to increase, which is baffling to me that this would continue.

Brian Lehrer: Would you say your decision to leave teaching had less or little to do with the stresses of teaching during the pandemic or the immediate post-pandemic year than the ongoing longer-term issue of underfunding?

Nucera: Ongoing long-term issues. It isn't just underfunding actually. I don't think that economics is the sole issue for what's happening in the schools. I think a willingness to want to do what needs to be done without making teachers feel like they need to seek therapy. They're get getting sick. So many teachers retired in the past few years since COVID because of what is expected and it's unrealistic. Yes, we want our students to do well. We want them to excel, but it doesn't have to come at the expense of the mental health and well-being of teachers.

Brian Lehrer: Nucera, thank you. Thank you so much for checking in on that. Call us again. Ben, we've been talking about mostly the retail sector and the health and the hospitality sector, but what about some of these others where there were such stresses during the pandemic and people did reach their breaking points? Nucera left teaching. Though to be clear, she put it very squarely on the back of long-term trends in teaching and pressures on teachers, not specifically pandemic-related, but a lot of people left education because it got even harder than it was.

A lot of people left healthcare ironically and sadly during the pandemic because that got to be even more of a pressure cooker than it was. Did that also change the power balance between workers and employers in those sectors for a while, and are those also going back?

Ben Casselman: I think that we can't overstate the degree to which the pandemic experience just disrupted everything. You get cases like this where education, healthcare, I think, are probably the prime examples of industries that were just overwhelmed in so many ways by the pandemic experience, jobs changing in these huge and dramatic ways. Burnout was a big issue. Obviously, we saw that in a lot of other industries as well. Retail right in the aftermath of the pandemic was incredibly difficult when people were being asked to enforce mask mandates and then dealing with the blowback that brought, particularly in some parts of the country.

I think inevitably we saw a lot of aftershocks from that that are going to take time to work out. There was also a real psychological piece of this where we had, I think, a lot of workers who felt for many years before the pandemic, like they were just being asked to do more and more and more, some of what the caller is talking about here, certainly in teaching, but also in other areas. The pandemic in some cases gave people a moment to stop and reevaluate. I've spoken to so many people who said, "It was the first moment I had to catch my breath. Then, once I did, I realized how unhappy I had been."

Then, we had a lot of people who, once they-- they did make a move, and there's something that can be empowering about that. You make a move and you discover, "Actually, hey, wait, if I'm unhappy, I can take things under my own control. I can do something about this." That can be at the individual level, or it can be at the collective level as we've seen in some of these unionization activities, "I don't like this workplace and I'm going to try to fix it."

Those psychological changes I think are more likely to persist. They're not just driven by the ebbs and flows of supply and demand. They're driven by something deeper. How will that reshape things as time goes on? I don't think we fully know that, but I don't think we should discount the possibility that workers have been changed by this experience and their relationship with their employers has been changed, and some of that could prove lasting.

Brian Lehrer: There was an article on the news organization, The City, called Amazon Prime Day, which was last week, and Retail Jobs in New York, by their business writer Greg David, with the subhead being, "They are disappearing," The retail jobs are, "even as the local economy recovers, and that's a big deal." I wonder if you see that as particularly a New York thing. You're New York-based, besides doing national economic reporting for The Times, and whether you see the perhaps looming UPS strike as a function of that. Maybe workers in that sector have more power now to demand better wages and working conditions because the country's economy is so much more dependent on delivery.

Ben Casselman: Yes, no, I think it's a great point. We tend to focus on these big high-level national aggregate statistics, the unemployment rate, GDP, inflation. Those have by and large bounced back really. Of course, inflation has its own story, but employment and GDP, consumer spending, these big aggregates, have bounced back really strongly from the pandemic and have really in many cases surpassed where they were pre-pandemic. You dig beneath the surface, and there are a ton of changes.

At the geographic level, New York, the economy has bounced back significantly more slowly than the national economy. That's true in many large cities. We've reshaped the way we work, and we're obviously all still in the process of figuring out what that's going to look like, how much we're in the office, what happens to downtowns. That's going to be an ongoing evolution that New York and other cities are obviously very much in the middle of trying to figure out.

Then, there's at the industry level. We shop differently than we did before the pandemic. In many cases, it accelerated trends that were already in place but accelerated them sometimes by years or decades. That is creating a shakeout. Retail jobs have bounced back nationally, I think, better than many people might have expected, but they are still below where they were in the pandemic. In places like New York, they're significantly below.

Then, meanwhile, you have warehouses and delivery are employing far more people. UPS is clearly an example of this, where those workers are more in demand than they've ever been and feel like they have been taken advantage of and feel like they have some leverage there. We'll see what happens with that strike if it occurs, but we are certainly much more dependent. I don't know how many UPS packages you have dropped off in your building every day, Brian, but here it feels like they're unloading an enormous truck every single day. We're much more dependent on that as an economy than we were before. Workers are saying, "Hey, I think we deserve some of that."

Brian Lehrer: What about rents in this respect? Again, with your eye on the New York economy, we're hearing two what seem to me extremely contradictory things. One is, people are leaving New York. People with the means to leave New York are leaving New York, and rents are going up like crazy. Your national stat in a recent piece you did on The Times is that rents have risen nearly 18% since the beginning of the pandemic. I don't know if you have a New York City figure for that, but presumably, if people with means to pay more are leaving, then supply and demand would see rates go down, rents go down, but the opposite seems to be happening. What?

Ben Casselman: I know. It seems like the basic rules of economics have been blown up here. I think there are a few things that are happening here at once. One of them is, just to get a picture of what's going on with rents, they, in many cases, and New York certainly as an example of this, actually fell in the pandemic. I think many people who stuck around New York or returned early on in the pandemic, got in some cases very good-looking rents because it wasn't clear. The demand was there, and then we had an inevitable bounce back. Some of the surge in rents that we saw was a bounce-back effect from the pandemic period.

We are seeing rents rise a little more slowly now than they were, but of course, rising more slowly doesn't feel very good. If your rent has gone up 20%, 30%, and I've heard cases of 50% over the last couple of years, and now, it's not going up as quickly, but it still feels awfully, awfully high. It's certainly not coming down. We all know rents in New York never seem to go down. It's hard to celebrate a slightly slower increase. I think the supply and demand question is a really interesting one. We have seen people come back to New York. They may not be going back to the office in the same way, but you walk around the neighborhoods of Brooklyn or of Queens or anywhere in the city and people are back.

We are hearing stories of people who are leaving. We certainly know that some of that is true, but we also know there was a tremendous undersupply of homes before the pandemic that persists. You had people who were doubling up and tripling up, squeezing into places to the extent that there's any easing in demand from people leaving, that's going to be immediately filled by people who who have been looking for homes for a long time. That puts a squeeze on demand. I think as long as we have the situation of having more people who want to live in the city, then there are homes for them, we're going to continue to see pressure on rents, and we're certainly seeing that.

Brian Lehrer: Let me throw one more listener question at you that came in. This one could be a book or even a series of volumes, I think, but you've got a minute left in the segment to give us a quick take. The caller asks, what is the effect of baby boomers retiring en mass due to age on the economy?

Ben Casselman: That could be many books. What I'll say is this, we do know that the combination of retiring baby boomers and then the reduced immigration that we've seen means that we have fewer workers. There was this idea of "nobody wants to work anymore for a while there." That's not true statistically at all. We have seen people who are of working age have come back to work, are actually working at their highest rate in decades, but there are fewer people of working age relative to the population.

As baby boomers retire, as people also stay in school longer, we're seeing more pressure on the people who are of working age to work. They're being asked to do more. That has all sorts of economic implications, but certainly for the workforce, it means that there are fewer people out there to work, and maybe that does create a little bit of leverage for workers going forward.

Brian Lehrer: Ben Casselman writes about business and the economy for The New York Times. Maybe you saw his recent piece that inspired us to invite him on today called The Great Resignation is Over. Can Workers' Power Endure? Ben, thanks a lot.

Ben Casselman: Thanks so much for having me.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.