David Goldman/AP Photo
Ellen Booth, of Coventry, Rhode Island, lost her restaurant job last year due to the coronavirus pandemic and began studying to become a certified medical coder.
Economists have been puzzling over the fact that the economy is full of job openings, but workers idled in the pandemic recession have been slow to take them. And the explanation is not just lousy wages, because the shortage of workers has often bid up pay levels to more than double the minimum wage, even among chronically stingy employers like Amazon and fast-food franchises.
Nor is the reason extra unemployment compensation. In Republican-led states where governors acted to terminate benefits, there was no rush of job applicants. Patricia Cohen, writing in The New York Times, interviewed executives of recruiting agencies and found that workforce development professionals reported “virtually no uptick in applicants” since cutoff of extra benefits by Republican governors.
A survey for Prudential found that 25 percent of workers planned to look for a new job soon, or double the usual rate. Interviews with workers suggested that the enforced break caused them to rethink their lives.
NPR quoted a San Diego restaurant manager named Jeremy Golembiewski reflecting on “what I want out of life now.” He told the interviewer: “Working 50, 60 hours a week for what they’re paying just—it isn’t worth it anymore … I want to see my 1-year-old and my 5-year-old’s faces light up.”
Evidently, millions of Americans came to the same conclusion. The forced, makeshift accommodations of the pandemic made the option of working from home at least some of the time look pretty good. Likewise, spending more time with the kids, or even changing careers entirely.
All of this put me in mind of a small classic of a 20th-century book with a funny title: economist Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. The book was highly prized by my generation, but most people under 40 have probably never heard of it.
Hirschman’s great insight was that contrary to the premises of standard economics, there is more than one way to exercise a preference. You can exit—a job, a community, a marriage, or a country; or you can stick around and make your views known and try to change things for the better—voice. If you’ve used the word “voice” in that sense, you are subconsciously echoing Hirschman, since this usage was his original coinage.
The pandemic gave ordinary people, who often felt stuck in jobs they hated, permission to make more choices.
And where does loyalty come in? The ability to make your voice heard without fearing adverse consequence engenders and makes for happier, more efficient, more reciprocal and loyal connections.
I’ve been a Hirschman fan all of my adult life. If you want to know a little more about his life and work, I wrote this appreciation after he died in 2012.
What do the surprising aftereffects of the pandemic have to do with Hirschman’s way of looking at the world? The pandemic increased options both for exit and for voice. It gave ordinary people, who often felt stuck in jobs they hated, permission to make more choices—the very essence of personal freedom—but in Hirschman’s sense, not in Milton Friedman’s sense of maximizing utility in a social vacuum.
The usual economist’s one-dimensional calculation of whether higher wages in a tight labor market might be inflationary and thus bad for economic efficiency misses a much richer set of effects and possibilities. Think of it as a four-way bank shot:
The pandemic opened people’s eyes to new options. The combination of unemployment compensation and lots of job openings made them think twice about taking just any job. Some decided to work from home or learn whole new careers. And that shake-up just might increase both one’s life satisfaction and one’s contribution to the economy and the society.
As the economist Dean Baker points out, much of the gain in improved living standards will not be counted in GDP. “If people can work remotely or only physically go to work two to three days a week, they have huge savings in work-related expenses, in addition to the time saved from not commuting. None of this will be picked up in measured GDP or productivity growth.”
It should not take a pandemic, of course, for working people to have more choices and richer workplace lives. A full-employment economy also helps. So do effective unions, and paid family and medical leave, and good options for child care, as well as loyalty in Hirschman’s sense by employer to worker.
How strange that one of the worst domestic catastrophes in a century has opened the door to new and affirming possibilities. But as the old saying goes, it’s an ill wind that blows no good. It is up to all of us, both as individuals in the workplace and as citizens influencing political choices, to maximize the moment.
