Media Slavishly Praise Strong Jobs Market as Being Saved by Vaccines

Media Slavishly Praise Strong Jobs Market as Being Saved by Vaccines by David Haggith for The Great Recession

When the LA Times wrote that “A record 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs in November,” they said it was…

a sign of confidence and more evidence that the U.S. job market is bouncing back strongly from last year’s coronavirus recession.

Reuters also said it was…

 a show of confidence in the labor market.

That is what you say when you reach into your answer files and pull out the standard answer even when you are faced with a very non-standard surge in quits because you don’t stop to think about why on earth the surge would be so extraordinary.

For example, the biggest rise in quits also timed out the following labor change reported by Zero Hedge:

The latest JOLTS Job Openings and Labor Turnover data showed the biggest drop since the peak of the covid Pandemic, as a whopping 529K job openings were lost in November, the most since the 1.139 million jobs lost in April 2020.

“Quits” are defined as the entire number of people who quit during a given month. “Job openings” are defined as the number of jobs that are open at the end of a given month. So, if 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November and a net of 529,000 open jobs closed. At the same time only 210,000 new jobs were added in November. So, even if all the new jobs were filled right away AND the number of jobs remaining open dropped by 529,000, that still leaves 3.76 million people who quit and did not take a job.

Yes, you can argue there was a record surge of confidence that caused 3.76 million people to quit just before the holidays without taking a new job.

However, I think I have a more reasonable explanation

Could it possibly be that this huge number of people quit, taking no new job, in November because the Biden Mandates (abbreviated BMs) were scheduled back then to kick in at the start of December? Could it be?

Many people hate to have getting fired on their record. They would far rather quit than get fired for a couple of reasons: 1) quitting is far easier on the ego than being fired; 2) they can give their own reasons for moving on to the next employer, even if they make them up, and no one will know they’re made up. That way, when the employer they are interviewing with calls their old employer, the old won’t be able to say “We fired her for insubordination.”

Also people quitting for that reason would be less likely to take up new jobs because many of the new jobs would have the same vaccine mandates. And they would not show up on unemployment roll or in the unemployment count in some states because some states are not allowing people to collect unemployment benefits if they are fired for refusing the vaccination, calling it “insubordination.” Because those states will not award them benefits, they never go on the unemployment roll (which largely remains unchanged from October to November, rising by 210,000 people).

Let me also point out that, if people were quitting to move on to better jobs or better pay, the new jobs should be getting filled. They’re not. ZHreports…

there was a new record, or 3.7 million, more vacant jobs than unemployed workers in November.

If you are refusing to get vaccinated, chances are pretty good you can’t take the new jobs, and you won’t show up in the count of unemployed people either.

The Times’ deployment of the standard explanation for quits might be true in normal times, but the record number of quits now is an anomaly that likely has nothing to do with a high sense of job security because who feels high job security right before the holidays in 2021, going into another COVID surge during a time of scorching inflation with soaring heating costs and winter clothes and gifts to buy and big dinners to throw? That seems to me like the least likely explanation for where all these people suddenly disappeared off to in November.

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