Australia hasn’t had the Great Resignation, but more people are quitting now

The past year has been awash with suggestions countries such as Australia are experiencing a “great resignation” as workers previously loyal to their employers quit their jobs and look for others elsewhere.

Last year, newspaper articles aside, there was little evidence for this in Australia, although substantial evidence in the United States where the term came from.

In the US, so-called “quit rates” hit a record high in 2021, while in Australia the proportion of workers switching jobs fell to its lowest point in half a century.

Writing in November, University of Melbourne economists Mark Wooden and Peter Gahan pointed out that in the US, COVID had made public-facing jobs unsafe, which may have contributed to people quitting these roles en masse.

Quit rates hadn’t climbed in US finance or information technology jobs.

In Australia, where border closures, mask mandates and vaccination mandates made public-facing jobs safer, job-switching continued its long-term decline since the late 1980s.

Until now. The annual February mobility survey published by the Bureau of Statistics in May shows an uptick in the proportion of workers switching, from a record low of 7.5 per cent to 9.5 per cent.

One way to look at the uptick is to say Australia has the highest switching rate since 2012. If records only went back to 2012, we could say Australia had the highest switching rate on record.

But here’s the thing. The US records only go back to December 2000. If they went back further, US quit rates might be seen to be on the same sort of long-term slide as Australia’s. We just don’t know.