Dive Brief:

• Workers who quit jobs last year — churning up the U.S. labor market — blame their departures on low pay, no opportunities for advancement and a feeling of disrespect at work, according to Pew Research Center.
• “Those who quit and are now employed elsewhere are more likely than not to say their current job has better pay, more opportunities for advancement and more work-life balance and flexibility,” Pew said in a report. 
• Nearly one out of every three workers (31%) who left jobs last year said they did so because of disruption from the coronavirus, Pew said. Child care challenges prompted a high percentage of departures by workers with children younger than 18 living at home.

Dive Insight:

CFOs faced an unusually tight labor market in 2021 as workers jumped ship to new employers or remained sidelined by the delta or omicron variants of COVID-19.

The quits rate, or the number of workers who left their jobs as a percent of total employment, hit 3% in November, the highest rate since 2000, before easing to 2.8% in January, the Labor Department said Wednesday.

Job openings last year also hit a record, persisting above 10 million from June through December, according to the Labor Department.

The labor market remains tight this year. There were 11.3 million job openings in January, close to the 11.4 million record set in December.

Also, the jobless rate fell last month to 3.8% from 4% in January, the Labor Department said Friday.

The labor force participation rate, the proportion of workers either employed or seeking jobs, increased to 62.3% last month but is still 1.1 percentage point below the level prior to the onset of COVID-19. Many workers retired early soon after the pandemic struck.

Workers who quit jobs last year cited low pay (63%), no opportunities for advancement (63%) and feeling disrespected at work (57%), with at least a third saying these were major reasons they left, Pew said.

Workers also cited a lack of scheduling flexibility, inadequate benefits and a desire to move to a different area, Pew said.

“Workers who quit a job last year and are now employed somewhere else see their current work situation as an improvement over their most recent job,” according to Pew.

Pew surveyed 6,627 non-retired U.S. adults between Feb. 7 and Feb. 13, including 965 who say they left a job by choice last year.