Thousands joined the Great Resignation in Charlotte. It’s changing how we think about work
Editor’s note: This story was updated on April 26, 2022, to include comment from Carolina Public Press.
The journalism that Arturo Pineda did at a North Carolina nonprofit was a calling, others often said, the type of job worth sticking out for three to five years, at least.
Pineda arrived in Charlotte from New Haven, Connecticut, for the first day of work last June, and was willing to overlook a few drawbacks, like low pay and long hours.
That proved to be more difficult than expected for the 25-year-old, who uses gender neutral pronouns “they” and “them.” The work was demanding. The organization’s staff, except for Pineda, was white, they said. The health care stipend didn’t cover the higher costs of care needed by Pineda, a transgender person.
Three to five years suddenly seemed like a long time to wait for things to change. Those downsides added up, and Pineda finally quit their role at Carolina Public Press in October.
In a statement, Carolina Public Press said that Pineda, a Report for America corps member at the organization, “did not work more than their 40-hour a week full-time job required. Pineda also did not have a 20-to-30-minute commute while working for CPP. The job was completely telecommuting from their home in Charlotte, except for infrequent reporting field assignments.”
Pineda is one of nearly 50 million workers who voluntarily quit their job last year, a pandemic-era phenomenon that economists have since dubbed “The Great Resignation.” In Charlotte, tens of thousands of workers quit in just the last few months.
It’s been a record-breaking labor market phenomenon that spans all income levels, said Sydney Idzikowski, a data and research coordinator at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute who’s studied the trend.
The effects are already taking hold in Charlotte: some workers, like Pineda, are reevaluating what makes a job worth sticking around for.
“I originally had set off with the mentality of ‘I’ll pay my dues if I can put up with it,’” said Pineda, who now works as a paralegal at the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy. “But triaging the downsides of a job isn’t really how it works.”
Other people are leaving low-paying restaurant and retail gigs for steadier roles in an office or warehouse. On the other end of the labor market, local companies and staffing offices are adjusting to a job market where candidates hold all the power.
“It’s an unprecedented movement of workers,” Idzikowski said. And if companies want to keep their employees? “You kind of have to shell out a bit.”
Breaking records for quitting jobs
In November, more than 4.5 million workers quit their job across the country — the highest number on record since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started recording the data.
Through the end of 2021, the numbers were “just breaking records, month over month,” Idzikowski said. In February, the latest data available, that total had dipped just slightly to 4.3 million workers quitting.
The bureau doesn’t track such numbers monthly at the local level, so Idzikowski used national rates to gauge the impact in Charlotte. She applied monthly nationwide quit rates by industry to local employment estimates.
It adds up to about 32,268 people who quit their job in Charlotte in February, her analysis showed, down slightly from about 35,000 who left in December. The trend is stabilizing “at a high level,” Idzikowski said.
In February, North Carolina was ranked ninth for the highest job resignation rate in the nation, according to a study published by personal finance website WalletHub, with a resignation rate of 3.2% over the last year.
There’s a sober element to these labor shortage statistics, Idzikowski says: some people stopped working because they got sick from COVID.
But more broadly, she thinks employees across industries and income levels are rethinking their jobs after the pandemic added risk, induced burnout or at the very least made significant changes to the way they worked.
“I don’t think people don’t want to work,” Idzikowski said. “I think people want to be valued at work.”
‘Willing to try something new’
Jennifer Zerrusen, 34, spent most of her career working in retail: as a design manager for Basset Furniture and then as the owner and manager of a smoothie bar at a Club Fitness on Tryon Street.
She left the labor force in 2019 after being diagnosed with breast cancer. When she returned to the job search last year after her cancer went into remission, she had new concerns about the career she’d once loved.
“I was terrified to work,” Zerrusen said. She worried that catching COVID so soon after treatment could land her in the hospital again, or that she would bring the virus home to her three children.
Still, she accepted a gig as a personal shopper at a local Harris Teeter late last year. Her COVID fears eased, but she struggled with the job’s irregular hours.
“As long as it was retail, I was always going to work nights and weekends,” Zerrusen said. “With three kids, I needed stability.”
She visited a recruiter at Specialized Recruiting Group in Charlotte and left her Harris Teeter role in January for a job she never would’ve thought to consider pre-pandemic: a customer service role at an HVAC company’s office in Ballantyne.
“I’ve always said ‘I do not want to work 9-to-5 in an office, I just couldn’t do it,’ ” Zerrusen said. “That’s exactly what I do now, and I love it.”
She likes the consistent hours that allowed her to take her 11-year-old son to evening soccer practice. And when her 6-year-old daughter had to stay home sick from school, she was able to skip the office and work from home.
Although COVID cases are waning in Mecklenburg County, she likes knowing that, in case of another COVID wave, it won’t risk her livelihood. “I have more job security.”
Zerrusen credits the pandemic and her battle with cancer — two challenges she dealt with simultaneously over the last two years — for changing her perspective of her work.
“It changed the way I thought about life, and I became more open,” she said. “I was willing to try something new.”
A changing mentality
There were many in Charlotte like Zerrusen who left their job for a very different one in the last year, said Bill Sofio. He owns the two Charlotte locations for Express Employment Professionals, a nationwide staffing company.
Some workers walking through his doors are burnt out retail or restaurant employees seeking better hours and higher pay. Some are pre-pandemic cubicle dwellers searching for a remote position that lets them permanently work from home.
Others are just job seekers taking advantage of a hot market.
“Sometimes … the company hasn’t changed their mentality toward what’s going on in the workforce (today),” Sofio said. “And people just don’t stand for it anymore. They leave.”
Charlotteans may have noticed the impact of a tight labor market at their local grocery store or fast-food joint, but it’s a job candidate’s market in all industries, Sofio said. The city’s rapid development seems to only whip things into more of a frenzy.
Applicants at his staffing offices are approaching the search with higher expectations on everything from wages to work environment.
As for employers that are hiring? “If you are not moving quickly (to respond to that),” Sofio said, “you are losing candidates in buckets, every day.”
Focusing on employee satisfaction
Cassandra Whitlow works as a recruiter and manages a career coaching business in Concord. She sees the same trends, watching employees leave to pursue promotions, higher pay or a better company culture.
“I think employers fail to realize that if they don’t focus on employee satisfaction, they’re going to lose them in this climate,” she said. “It’s almost guaranteed.”
Workers who put in their two-week notice often have plenty of options, she said. “As a recruiter,” she said, “for every offer that I extend, there’s about two to four (other) offers that the candidate has received.”
That was something Pineda took advantage of when they left their nonprofit job in October, with a few interviews done but no offer on the table. “I knew that, in short, businesses were hurting for employees,” they said. “I knew there was no shortage of openings.”
In general, Sofio said, job seekers at his Charlotte staffing office are asking more of employers as they rethink the role that their job plays in their lives.
“What’s happened over the last two years is people have taken a step back,” he said. “That saying about to ‘work to live, not live to work’ has really come to fruition in this economy.”
Changing work as we know it
Higher rates of workers quitting their jobs isn’t the only trend making waves in the evolving post-pandemic labor market, said Mark Vitner, a Charlotte-based senior economist at Wells Fargo.
During the worst of COVID, many baby boomers — and some Gen Xers — retired early, he said, dropping out of the labor force entirely. Other groups, like parents, stopped working temporarily due to school closures or other caregiving needs, although they may soon come back.
The wave of people returning to the office may prove to be a litmus test for which changes are permanent, Vitner said.
“It has the potential to become a big positive in the labor force,” he said. “If (the pandemic) added a little bit more flexibility to the work environment, that could actually pull more people into the workforce over the long term.”
Some Charlotte companies have already made changes as employees return to the office.
Wells Fargo is bringing workers back to the office with a “hybrid flexible” work model. Honeywell will let workers adjust their schedule, starting their eight-hour workday earlier or later than the traditional 9 to 5. Truist CEO Bill Rogers told investors in January that “hybrid and more flexible work are here to stay.”
“COVID has changed work as we know it, that’s clear,” said Idzikowski, the UNCC researcher. “And, at least from what I’ve seen locally, I think industries are learning (that).”
’There is a better job’
In her work as a career coach, Whitlow urges clients to think of the ideal role their job plays in their lives.
It’s important to know your worth, as an employee and an individual, she said. And she’s happy that the past year has inspired more workers to recognize that and stop settling in their work lives.
“You definitely want to feel valued, you want to feel respected,” Whitlow said. “You also want to feel like you’re contributing to the totality of whatever the goal is.”
Workers who don’t feel that way in their current job have a good shot at finding it elsewhere in today’s market, she said.
Pineda hopes the shift in the labor market — in Charlotte and beyond — spurs workers to ask more of their employers. They’d like to see the Great Resignation inspire a movement for better pay, benefits and working conditions for all employees, especially those from marginalized groups.
“The pandemic was a major catastrophe,” they said. “It also only exacerbated conditions that have already been present for the most vulnerable populations.”
In their new role at the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy, Pineda said, they get to work directly with some of those groups. No job is perfect, they said, but this one is a much better fit. They don’t regret handing in their two weeks last fall.
“I think there’s a narrative of ‘You’ll never find a better job,’ which is a lie,” they said. “There is a a better job.”
This story was originally published April 22, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
