Casarsaguru | E+ | Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Millions of workers left their jobs during the “Great Resignation” of the Covid-19 pandemic, but economic insecurity and uncertainty have once more turned the tides of the labor market toward the “Great Stay.”<\/p>\n
Economists coined the term to refer to fewer employees leaving jobs, and fewer employers hiring or firing new workers.<\/p>\n
“We had this ‘Great Resignation’\u00a0just a couple of years ago,” Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, told CNBC. But now, “workers aren’t going anywhere,” she noted.<\/p>\n
“They’ve got their dream job, which is probably partly at home, maybe with a big salary pickup … And what we actually see in the data is very low turnover, which is very unusual in the U.S.,” she added.<\/p>\n
“<\/strong>I call it the ‘Great Stay.’ People are staying put. They’re not leaving. And they’re staying put in things like IT and software development, where you would normally see a lot of turnover,” she noted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Likewise, Richardson said firms were putting hiring decisions on hold “because they’re uncertain about the road ahead, not necessarily because they’re trying to reduce their headcount.”<\/p>\n Describing the trend as a “no-hire, no-fire market,” Richardson said the momentum is clearly slowing in terms of hiring, although initial U.S. jobless claims \u2014 a proxy for layoffs \u2014 are still near historical lows.<\/p>\n “We think it’s no-fire, no-layoff [environment] right now because firms are so reluctant to let people go, because it took so long in the U.S. to get them back.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The turnaround from the “Great Resignation” is dramatic: the Covid-19 pandemic ended the longest employment and economic expansion in U.S. history, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics<\/a>, with around 50.5 million people quitting their jobs in 2022, up from 47.8 million in 2021.<\/p>\n But there are signs that the U.S. jobs market is cooling; nonfarm payroll growth came in at a slower-than-expected 73,000 in July, the latest data from Aug.1 showed<\/a>, while the unemployment rate ticked higher\u00a0to 4.2%.<\/p>\n The weak report could provide an incentive for the U.S. Federal Reserve to lower interest rates when it next meets in September, economists said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A similar trend was seen in the U.K., where the number of job vacancies rose to a record 1,172,000 over the August-October 2021 period, according to the Office for National Statistics<\/a>. By the second quarter of 2022, the total number of job vacancies had reached 1,295,000, the ONS said<\/a>. <\/p>\n![\"We](\"https:\/\/image.cnbcfm.com\/api\/v1\/image\/108181443-17543551081754355105-41038407039-1080pnbcnews.jpg?v=1754355107&w=750&h=422&vtcrop=y\")
UK seeing similar shift<\/h2>\n
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