A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September as labor market tumult continued
Rising coronavirus cases, problems finding child care and better wages elsewhere have all prompted a record number of Americans to quit their jobs
A street vendor sits near a sign advertising job openings in a retail store in New York in October. (Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock )
By Eli Rosenberg
Today at 10:06 a.m. EST|Updated today at 12:57 p.m. EST
A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September as Americans continued to take advantage of ample job openings to look for alternatives, a sign of how imbalances in the labor market continue to complicate the economic recovery 20 months into the pandemic.
September’s “quit” numbers constituted 3 percent of the workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number is up from the previous record set in August, when 4.3 million people quit their jobs — about 2.9 percent of the workforce.
The statistics reflect the changes that continue to wrench the labor market after the pandemic upended the course of business and life across the country in 2020.
Americans are quitting their jobs for a number of reasons.
In September, when the delta variant of the coronavirus reached its most recent peak, child care and schooling pressures forced many employees to rethink their daily routine. Many other workers, meanwhile, were lured to other jobs because of better pay and benefits as employers became desperate to fill openings. Safety issues remain a pressing concern for workers who work in industries that require a high volume of face-to-face interactions. And retirements have also picked up pace, as many older Americans have decided to resign.
“There are likely some delta-induced quits here,” said Daniel Zhao, an economist at Glassdoor. “Workers are fed up with working conditions and feel unsafe and quitting even though they might not immediately jump into a new job.”
Those pressures are reflected in the industry-specific data in Friday’s report. Sectors with the highest percentages of workers quitting include trade, transportation and utilities. There were also high levels of people quitting jobs in retail, professional and business services, as well as leisure and hospitality work like arts and entertainment, hotels and restaurants. A whopping 6.6 percent of workers in accommodation and food services quit their job in the month.
In September, the biggest increases in quits included entertainment and recreation (+56,000) and education and health services (+54,000).
“Quits are high in leisure and hospitality, health services and education,” Zhao noted. “Those are all industries where an increase in covid can make work less safe.”
The South, the West and Midwest have the highest numbers of workers quitting their jobs, at 3.3, 3.1 and 3.0 percent, while only 2.2 percent of workers in the Northeast are quitting jobs. This is consistent with trends seen in August, which showed that workers in more rural areas quit at a higher rate in part because they had more leverage to demand better pay.
The country has regained the vast majority of jobs lost in the earliest months of the pandemic but still has over 4 million fewer jobs than in February 2020. Economists have been looking to the return to full employment as an important milestone, but labor shortages, surging caseloads from the delta variant, supply chain issues and other wrinkles have emerged to complicate that recovery. The high level of turnover among employees is adding to the mismatch, as lower-wage jobs are increasingly hard to fill because workers in those professions are finding alternatives.
Businesses and industry groups have complained vociferously about trouble finding available workers since the country’s wide reopening in the spring, as they have sought to hire up. Efforts to curtail unemployment benefits have shown little success in prompting large numbers of people back into the labor market.
but definitely a good trend. wages are trash
businesses raised wages because dems failed to do anything?
12 is an easier sell, for obvious reasons. and no, 15 should not be the minimum wage in shythole southern states.
what an incoherent argument
the minimum wage is unchanged. you think businesses raised wages because the far left was whining on twitter? 
why bother raising taxes if they can just whine about it, and musk and bezos will start cutting checks to the treasury?