Why Work Is Becoming Less Important to Americans
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Here's your Money Briefing for Monday, March 11th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Your job is your career. It pays the bills. It keeps you on a schedule.
How has Americans’ relationship to work changed since the pandemic?
And yet more Americans say while they like their job, it's a lot less important than it used to be.
They want to spend more time sleeping in. They want to spend more time with a leisure, walking the dog, more time looking after their health, right? So they're more likely to take their medical leave and all these things. They're basically more me time, more family time.
We'll talk to Wall Street Journal chief economics commentator Greg Ip after the break.
Americans say they don't care as much about work as they used to. Wall Street Journal chief economics commentator Greg Ip joins me. Greg, what is the complexion of the labor market now compared to before the pandemic?
Well, if you look at the overall indicators, it kind of looks very similar. The unemployment rate is below 4% now, just as it was right before the pandemic. The share of the population that's in the workforce, what we call the participation rate, that's around the same as it was before the pandemic. And if you look at how fast wages are growing, if you subtract inflation, that rate of increase in real wages is also around the same. But if you actually look below the surface, you see big, big changes, changes in attitudes that tell us that work is just not as central to the lives of people as it used to be.
Yeah, how are we seeing this in the data? How have attitudes about work changed?
Partly, you can see that in the number of hours that people work, for example. Research by an economist at one of the Federal Reserve Banks found that in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, people in the labor force shrank, but then they started coming back. But as they came back, some people, in particular men, interestingly enough, did not return to the number of hours that they used to work. So that was one clue. And we can look at a variety of other data that shows that the number of hours a full-time worker now spends working in a given year has declined relative to 2019. And then more sort of anecdotal stuff, for example, the number of people taking all their vacation or all their sick leave, that's going up as well.
There was a Pew survey about this.
What did that survey say?
Well, interestingly enough, yes, this survey asked folks, how central is your job or your occupation to your identity? And about 24% said it was central. When they asked the same question right after the pandemic, that had dropped to 17%. We don't have an exact survey that asks the same question since, but there are other surveys that try and get at the same question. And they show the same thing, that generally speaking, work and occupation and career are just not as core to individuals' identity today as they were five years ago.
Does this mean that people just don't like their jobs or they don't like their boss?
I don't think so because there are surveys that ask people, do you like your job? What's your level of job satisfaction? And for the most part, people seem pretty happy with their jobs. I think it's more that there's just other things that they want to spend their time doing. Other things matter more to them.
So what other things do people want to do?
You only have to look around your own neighborhood or ask your own friends and relatives. We can see what they want to do. They want to spend more time with their family. You know, they want to spend more time sleeping in. They want to spend more time with a leisure, walking the dog, more time looking after their health. So they're more likely to take their medical leave and all these things. They're basically more me time, more family time. That's essentially what we're seeing.
How are we seeing this change in attitude about work play out in the labor force and in job availability specifically?
Well, for one thing, even though the unemployment rate is the same as it was a little more than four years ago, the number of vacancies, the jobs that employers are unable to fill, that's much higher.
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