The "Great Resignation": the Changing Wage-Nexus in the United States and the United Kingdom after the Covid-19 Pandemic

Nicholas Sowels ()
Additional contact information
Nicholas Sowels: PHARE - Philosophie, Histoire et Analyse des Représentations Économiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This communication seeks to examine how the wage-nexus has changed in the United States and the United Kingdom as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and following what has been called the "Great Resignation" of workers as of early 2021. The communication notes that massive monetary and fiscal support for firms and households meant that unemployment returned quickly to very low levels by 2022, as labour markets tightened, partly as a result of high job quits-the cause of the Great Resignation. The latter and its multiple causes are then reviewed. Despite tighter labour markets, and low unemployment, real wages were subsequently squeezed through to the end of 2022, due to the unexpected, strong rise of inflation which began in spring 2021. It is possible that workers may be in a stronger position to push for higher pay henceforth, given labour market tightness prevailing in early 2023 and the possibility of a significant slowdown in the rise of global wage labour. This could alter labour-capital relations, which have been unfavourable to workers since the policy shifts to neoliberalism from the late 1970s onwards. However, despite the widespread popular support for socalled "frontline workers" during the pandemic, little indicated at the time of writing that workers and labour in general are getting greater political support from governments and national political institutions. In short, workers may today have some more market power, but nothing like the historical compromise of Fordism between labour and capital, which followed the Great Depression and World War II, seems likely today.

Keywords: Great Resignation; labour; workers; Covid-19; pandemic; Fordism; United States; United Kingdom; wage-nexus; industrial relations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-09-08
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04172216
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in The History of Regulation Theory and its Contributions to the Analysis of Global Capitalism and its Recent Crises (Covid-19, Ukraine, etc. ) Paris (+ visio), 8-9 septembre 2022, Nicholas Sowels, Sep 2022, Paris, France

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-04172216/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04172216

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().