'Anti-work' movement an indicator of worker dissatisfaction with employers, job opportunities

Yahoo Finance's Brian Cheung contributes an analysis of the rising anti-work online movement where workers are opting out of the job market for a multitude of reasons, including working conditions.

Video transcript

- The Trump Hotel brand will be departing Washington, DC, after the company sold the rights to its historic Pennsylvania Avenue location for $375 million. According to the "Wall Street Journal," Miami based investment firm CGI Merchant Group is in contract to acquire that lease. The property will be managed by Hilton and will be branded by Hilton's Waldorf Astoria group. That historic building sits just a few blocks from the White House and is leased from the US government. Before it was a hotel, the location served as the US Post Office Department headquarters. And during the Trump presidency, it was sometimes criticized for conflicts of interest.

Japan's economy contracted in the last quarter as COVID 19 and supply chain disruptions slowed down the global economic recovery. The country's economy shrank by 0.8% in the third quarter. That was more deeply than expected as global supply disruptions hit exports and business spending plans. This, in addition to the rise in COVID 19 cases this summer in Japan. That led to emergency soft lockdown measures in Tokyo and other regions.

And a Southwest airlines employee in Texas was hospitalized after she was hit in the head by a passenger while boarding a New York City bound flight. After boarding the plane, a female passenger got in a verbal confrontation with an employee and was asked to leave the plane. But as the passenger was de-boarding, she confronted the employee again, and then hit her. Dallas police arrested the passenger and charged her with aggravated assault.

This comes as the FAA announced on November 9th, there have been more than 5,000 incidents of unruly passengers on flights this year. And Brian Sozzi, that might mean it's a tough sell for the airlines to hire flight attendants, which seems to point to a larger theme in the workforce right now.

- Yeah. You do not want to get attacked at any point on your job. And of course, that applies to the airline sector, as well. But those challenging labor market conditions may reflect what Goldman Sachs is calling a shift toward anti work. Yahoo Finance's Brian Cheung has been digging into this one and joins us now. Brian, good to see you working, clearly. You are not leading this anti work movement. But what is Goldman Sachs talking about here?

BRIAN CHEUNG: Yeah. Well, really interesting labor dynamics here, when you consider that since the beginning of the pandemic, about 5 million people have exited the labor force. Now, a large chunk of that is just because of those over 55 retiring early or just naturally retiring, which means that there's kind of a $1.7 million, let's call it, group of people that we need to look at in terms of trying to get them back into the labor force, because they might be willing to do so.

But there's this movement that Goldman Sachs pointed to in a note last week for anti work, which could present some longer run challenges to increasing labor force participation. I want to show you this chart from Goldman Sachs, which illustrates how anti work apparently has been catching more attention on Reddit and even the R/wallstreetbets thread of that GameStop mania fame of earlier this year. In terms of comments, actually, over the last few weeks, this anti work thread has been more popular than the wallstreetbets thread.

Now, what's inside of this Reddit thread? Mostly anecdotes of people much like that flight attendant story that Julie was talking about. Harassment from customers or clients, or mistreatment by managers, and the common thread in that subreddit is really about the idea of trying to find better work or, in many cases, deciding to leave the labor force entirely.

So, Goldman Sachs in a quote, saying, we see some risk that some workers will elect to remain out of the labor force for longer, provided they can afford to do so. And when you take a look at that JOLTS data, which we got last week, verifying that indeed, we saw a record amount of quits in the month of September. 4.4 million people deciding to leave the labor force, that does spell, indeed, a very interesting labor market dynamic for these workers, who could choose, if they wanted, to leave their jobs.

Now, of course, whether or not this is a longer run trend remains to be an open question. When you take a look at labor force participation numbers, notice that we've been struggling to get above 62%, guys.

- And we talked earlier to Ian Siegel of ZipRecruiter about all of these dynamics, and the challenges that employers are having finding workers right now. He also talked about one of the reasons why.

- 55% of job seekers are looking for a job that allows them to work remotely. Again, during the pandemic, people discovered a new, more satisfying way to live. It's the number one perk that employers are offering on ZipRecruiter. Two years ago, less than 2% of jobs mentioned remote work. Now, more than 10% of jobs mention remote work.

Those companies that are offering remote opportunities are experiencing the most success in recruiting. However, only about 40% of the jobs in America can be done remotely, which presents a really interesting question about what's going to have to happen to wages, or benefits, or perks, for those jobs that require face to face interaction on a daily basis with the public.

- And so, what he's talking about is this is effectively that something's going to give. Something has to give here, right? Like, you can't stay out of work forever. And employers need people. So, you know, it seems like this is going to-- like, you can't be anti work permanently. So, it seems like somehow, this is going to eventually resolve itself. Right?

BRIAN CHEUNG: Well, the operative word in the Goldman Sachs note was that this will be a trend of anti work if people can afford to do so. And that's certainly not going to be the case for a lot of these low wage workers, who we know have been more disproportionately impacted by the pandemic related layoffs. And then the post-COVID recovery concerns that have kept them on the sidelines.

So really, this anti-work-- and you know, Goldman Sachs though, didn't really get into-- the anti work thesis is likely only going to apply to those kind of in the middle wage spectrum, or actually higher to middle wage spectrum, who can have that nest egg to rely on, to not be able to work here. Now, of course, the type of longer run concerns here, this is all still playing out. And I think that the jury is still very much going to be out over the next few months, or even years, to figure out what the actual structural damage is to the labor market.

Not just from anti work movements, but also, for example, for women, the impact of child care, and whether or not the need to be at home with kids who aren't going to school as often, or have virtual setups, whether or not that's keeping them from going back into the labor force. So, this is just kind of one facet that Goldman Sachs is pointing out. It's an interesting one. But the jury is out on the extent and the magnitude by which this anti work movement, or Reddit at large, is impacting the labor market, of course.

- Yeah. Just one more quick comment on this, which is that having lived although a long time ago in Europe, this kind of attitude is much more prevalent there. However, the social safety net is much more broad and deep in Europe than it is here in the US. In other words, people can afford to not work for a much longer period of time. So, I'm not sure that that model is transferable. But I guess we'll have to see.

- Brian Cheung, working hard since 1993. We'll check back with you later.