Through 2020 America’s professional lives “had taken on the overtones of a secular religion,” argues a writer in the Washington Post, with jobs forming “a primary way to find meaning in the world and a crucial part of our identity…. Even precarious, low-paying gigs were valorized as ‘hustle culture,’ representing freedom to perform labor on our terms.”
But then…
Fast-forward to fall 2022. The number of people quitting, while down from the peak, remains at the highest level since the 1970s. White-collar workers don’t want to give up working remotely. Low-paying sectors such as the hospitality industry can’t find enough people willing to work for the wages on offer. Union organizing and strikes have been on an upswing…. [W]hat’s increasingly clear is that the March 2020 decision to partially close down the American economy shattered Americans’ dysfunctional, profoundly unequal relationship with work like nothing in decades. And even if there was