Opinion: Is the UK suffering from the effects of the 'great resignation'?

The theory goes that people faced with the prospect of a potentially fatal disease coupled with lockdowns and more time spent at home or on furlough took stock of their lives and decided that now was the time to make a change and handed in their notice.

For the record, that was more or less what I did. After more than a year of successfully working from home, my employers said everyone had to return to the office.

I decided there was more to life than spending three hours a day commuting to Manchester so I resigned and still haven’t returned to the workforce.

There is some debate about whether the UK has actually been affected by ‘the great resignation’ in the same way as has happened in the US where ‘job quits’ were at a very high level at the end of last year.

But the fact remains, there is a surfeit of job vacancies in this country and not enough people to fill them.

I mention this after reading a government-sponsored advertising feature on the Guardian’s website that talked about the ‘Way to Work’ initiative which aims to get 500,000 unemployed workers into jobs by the end of June.

The advert says it’s ‘part of ambitious UK Government plans to turbo-charge our national recovery from Covid-19’.

Its laudable aim is to use the Jobcentre Plus network to match employers with jobseekers (I thought that’s what they did in any event) but the government has stuck a label on the scheme so we’ll just have to see how it pans out.

I don’t know if we’re suffering from effects of the great resignation but it is clear there are plenty of jobs out there.

According to theguardian.com, there are 1.1 million fewer people in the workforce than there would have been had pre-pandemic trends continued, says Stephen Evans, chief executive of thinktank the Learning and Work Institute.

One of the causes of the drop is older workers – those aged 50 and over – leaving the workforce altogether. Support for this group – to encourage them to continue looking for work – has not been good enough, Evans says. That is a sentiment I can wholeheartedly agree with.

Another reason for the current vacancy crisis is that young people are spending longer in education before entering the workforce.

But (and Brexiters may want to look away at this point) a third of the missing 1.1 missing workers is because the population is smaller, as more people have left the UK after the country left the European Union, and fewer people are coming in.

This has exacerbated employment pinch points in sectors such as hospitality, agriculture and healthcare, leaving hotel beds unmade, crops rotting in the fields, livestock unslaughtered, flowers unpicked and old people’s bottoms unwiped.

Website theguardian.com quotes Jon Boys, labour market economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, who said: “A year ago [as furlough came to an end] we were worried there would be not enough jobs and too many candidates for them. Now we are worried that there are too many jobs and not enough candidates.”

During the early part of the pandemic, in 2020, there were four unemployed people for every vacancy in the UK. Now the ratio is one for one. “There aren’t many candidates out there”, Boys says.

Economists say the explanation for the current strength of the labour market is simple: demand for workers has been going up at a time when their supply has been limited.

On the demand side, the reopening of the economy as the pandemic loosens its grip has meant stronger competition for staff. On the supply side, a combination of factors means the labour force is smaller than it was expected to be pre-Covid [and post-Brexit].

If you want to see an effect in almost real time, you only have to look at Manchester Airport failing to cope with an increase in travellers.

At times, passengers have been forced to queue for three and four hours just to get through security because the airport simply does not have enough staff and has had to launch a massive recruitment drive as the holiday season starts.

While there is little doubt the pandemic has had a significant effect, it has to be admitted that Brexit and EU workers returning home has made a bad situation even worse.

But I have to confess I am a little surprised that all those ‘British jobs for British workers’ Brexiters haven’t been flooding to Lincolnshire to pick cabbages or to seaside towns to clean toilets in tourist hotels now the EU workers have gone home.

It’s what they wanted, isn’t it? Or isn’t this the Brexit they voted for?