The Great Renunciation, a silent revolution
It is happening in the United States, which for the time being remains the leading superpower and thus the one that sets the trends and directions of global society. It is the so-called Great Renunciation or Great Resignation, a term coined by the American psychologist and academic Anthony Klotz. What does it consist of? It is the phenomenon of an increasing number of workers deciding to leave their jobs, not for the usual reasons of changing companies and/or locations to advance both financially and in terms of personal fulfilment, but because they are fed up.
More than 20 million Americans have done so between March and December 2021, with particularly intense peaks in the autumn and early winter of this year. In addition to Klotz, other specialists in sociology, economics and labour relations are studying the evolution of a phenomenon that is seriously disrupting the fundamental pillars of American society.
One of them, Charles Hugh Smith, explains it in his blog OfTwoMinds, in which he describes a movement that he considers unstoppable as a true revolution. Not the revolution that some envisage in the form of armed insurrection, through a coup or the fragmentation of the nation through the declaration of independence from the federal government by the states, but a global movement of workers who are deciding to opt out of the system, who are choosing not to participate in it according to the parameters and paradigms of today's capitalist society.
"What leads them to the decision to abandon a career they believe to be unwinnable is exhaustion, the weariness of debt bondage, the feeling of powerlessness at having to accept exploitative working conditions and all the tedious trappings of neo-feudal neo-liberalism". Those millions of workers who quit the game no longer go on strike or storm the company by smashing its machines or work tools. They simply decide to change their priorities, to try their hand at some adventure of their own while the market sees the number of job offers without applicants swell every month: 11 million, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The dream of becoming a successful, hard-working, blue-collar executive who barely has time to set foot in the sumptuous mansion in which he lives or play golf leisurely is giving way to more down-to-earth ambitions, a radical change of priorities.
Few are left who are still convinced that corporate America rewards loyalty and still holds high the motto "we are a family". Long-term life planning has been replaced by a variant of "carpe diem", which prevents attachment to the company and dissolves the bonds of trust and commitment. An increasingly accelerated disappearance of classic clichés.
The growing number of disenchanted people become even more disenchanted when they also see other statistics that are disheartening: the richest 0.1% in the United States have more wealth than the poorest 80%, according to the World Inequality Database.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the dramatic increase in inequality, the greatest threat to the disintegration of a country and a society. According to data compiled by Vicente Castelló, professor at the Jaume I University, the legal minimum hourly wage of 7.25 dollars has not been updated for more than a decade; a third of the population cannot take holidays, and those who can are only entitled to a maximum period of 15 days; there is no maternity leave and there is no universal public health coverage, even though it is true that companies are obliged to arrange private health care in their contracts with their employees.
In short, what is being forged is a revolutionary change in society, for the moment a silent one, although it is well known that revolutions have a common characteristic, whatever their type: they are unpredictable.