Work sucks when

you’re the only one left

Not everyone quit during the Great Resignation.

When I reached out to Paige to talk about a post she’d written online about
feeling stretched at work, she first had a question for me: Was I her boss
secretly trying to trick her? She was a “little paranoid” about it, and rightly so
— the Oregon receptionist has not exactly had the warmest feelings about her
place of work lately.

Paige, who asked to withhold her last name in order to retain said job for
now, has felt extremely overworked lately. She was initially hired in late
2021 to work part time at a local medical office, but they’ve since lost a ton
of employees — the last receptionist on staff besides her just quit (when she
started, there were four). She now works 12-hour days, spending her lunch
hour at her desk since there’s no one to cover for her, and when she asks
about what’s going on, she’s told to be a “team player.”

Recently, it seemed like there would be some reprieve when the office made
a new hire, but the person was let go after three days because the manager —
the owner’s daughter — didn’t get along with them. “The vibes weren’t
good,” Paige said she was told. But, as she said, “Vibes don’t matter when
you literally have employees that are struggling.”

Sign up for The Big Squeeze

newsletter

Twice a month, Emily Stewart’s column exposes the ways we’re all being squeezed under
capitalism. Sign up here.

There has been no shortage of stories about the Great Resignation, the
Great Reshuffle, or whatever you want to call it. The rate of people quitting
their jobs has declined somewhat, but it still remains above pre-pandemic
norms. There are still about two job openings per every unemployed worker
in the United States. The labor market remains incredibly tight.

There has also been no shortage of stories about the impact all of this is
having on consumers. Air travel sucks. Restaurant service is a disaster.
Customers are throwing full-blown hissy fits in public.

What does this add up to for the workers still on the job, trying to make their
situations work under increasingly tight and stressful conditions? The “labor
leftovers,” if you will, are being asked to do the same amount of work or
more in order to compensate for their current situations. And, to put it
plainly, it sucks.
Millions of workers — blue-collar and white-collar — feel pushed to the
brink right now. They are overworked, disengaged, and burnt out. And
many, despite a labor market with mobility, feel like there’s no end in sight.
It’s still hard for many people to find a job, and when they do get to a new
place, some find it’s the same situation: too much work to go around with too
few workers to complete it.

Work stress and overwork impacts people’s lives outside the workplace in
myriad ways, said Joseph Mazzola, associate professor of psychology at
Meredith College and an expert in industrial and organizational psychology.
He noted that evidence shows life satisfaction can be fairly equally predicted
by satisfaction with one’s spouse and with one’s boss. “We know burnout is
linked to mental health issues like depression and anxiety and linked to
physical issues. It can eventually lead to heart attacks, hypertension, and a
number of terrible things. But even in the short term, it leads to more
symptoms like headaches, stomach aches, even body aches,” he said.

In Paige’s case, it’s just meant she’s not taking care of herself physically in
the way she probably should. She recently got sick. She told her boss she had
strep throat, hoping that would mean she would only need to miss Friday at
work, spend the weekend recovering, and be back on Monday. Her boss
wouldn’t allow her to call out unless she got a note from her doctor. So she
did — and it turns out she had Covid-19, meaning she had to be out for
longer. “I got so much shit at work following that,” she said.
Paige feels like she can’t quit, not because she really needs her job (her
partner could support them for a while), but because it needs her. “If I leave,
they will be absolutely screwed,” she said. At least they’ve raised her pay a
little bit. If she does manage to leave, it’s not like whoever replaces her is in
for a fun ride.

Do more, just with less — Signed, your

boss

At the outset of the pandemic, employers laid off workers in droves. Now,
they’ve had a hard time staffing back up, or in some cases, they don’t want
to, at least entirely. Many companies have figured out they can do more with
less. Amid fears of a recession on the horizon — on top of a tight labor
market — some are holding off on hiring until they see how it shakes out,
or letting attrition take its toll.

“On one hand yeah, maybe the employer’s like, ‘Yes, great, now more people
are available to hire,’ but the business mindset might win out is more of, ‘Do
I want to take that risk if economic growth is slowing down?’” said
AnnElizabeth Konkel, senior economist at Indeed Hiring Lab. “If your team
was able to operate with a smaller number, do you need more people? Maybe
not.”

That’s been the experience for Kate, a marketing coordinator at a

Pennsylvania engineering firm who, like all of the workers I spoke to for this
story, requested anonymity in order to protect their privacy and jobs. Over
her nearly two decades at the firm, her department has gotten leaner and
leaner — it was 10, then it was five, now it is two. “More staff kept leaving
and kept leaving, and we couldn’t find new people,” she said. Many of her
former colleagues have gone into different fields altogether.

Kate keeps trying to get across to her superiors that she cannot produce the
workload expected of her, but said she is repeatedly told she’s just “gotta
chip in” for the team. “I have all these deadlines through this week, and
there’s only so many hours,” she said. Her bosses ask her to complete 10
tasks; she explains that she can only do three, so they’ll have to choose; and
then they just … don’t. She puts in the hours to get all 10 done, but the
quality is lacking. “One thing I’m really worried about is I’m going to make a
big mistake.”

“What I keep thinking about is, what if everyone I worked with just worked
eight hours? How many employees would they have to hire to fill in?” she
said. Kate has browsed other job listings, but wonders what guarantee there is
that a new job would be any different. “I’ve looked at other companies and
just think, ‘well, it’s just more of the same somewhere else.’”

Companies are in a bit of a catch-22 situation in their staffing, Konkel said.

Employers may be able to entice new people through the door by offering
hiring bonuses, extra pay, etc. “But their staff is stretched really thin,” she
said, “and then more people quit, and it’s a cycle that goes on.”
Nicholas, who until recently worked as a production scheduler for a
manufacturing company in Pennsylvania, is one of those workers who finally
gave in and quit — leaving just one person behind in his department. He’d
been with the company for 17 years, working his way up from the factory
floor to the front office. Not only was he overworked from his front-office
job, but as a scheduler, he had a birds-eye view into what was happening with
workers across the company. “They had a real problem toward the end with
the amount of overtime they wanted people to work and how receptive the
general workers were to that,” he said.

Workers grew so tired, he said, it got to the point that about 75 percent of
people were even showing up every day. And because the company was so
short-staffed, there wasn’t much to be done. “They were just so desperate to
keep people, I don’t think there was much discipline going on,” he said.

In 2021, he put in a request to limit his own hours to 45 hours a week and
was written up for it, which “pretty much negated any yearly pay increase for
me,” he said. So he started looking for a new job, and after an eight-month
search, he found one. He sent what he describes as an “epic” letter on his way
out, calling out his department for an “environment of hostility and
unprofessionalism,” and informing his counterpart — now the only person on
his team — that she was “drastically” underpaid. He now has a job in the
public sector, where he said he’s making more money, doing less work, and
loving it.
The tight labor market lends to this overarching narrative that it is relatively
easy for workers to pick up and leave their jobs if they’re unhappy. This was
the case for Nicholas, and one economist I spoke to even suggested this was
the solution. But the reality for many workers is much more complicated.

Mazzola pointed to a phenomenon called “organizational commitment,”

where people feel attached to an organization or, in this case, a place of work.
Sometimes, people feel like they’re a part of helping the organization achieve
its goals. Or, they worry about what they might lose in leaving a job —
benefits or compensation or stability — and that holds them back. Or they
feel a sense of guilt about exiting, worrying that there will be consequences
for the company or for their colleagues.

The good news, at least in part, is that the pandemic has brought some of
these longstanding issues to the forefront. “To see people talk about burnout,
to see them tell their employers they want work-life balance, is good,”
Mazzola said. “Whether or not we’ve made strides on people being less
burned out, that still remains to be seen.”

Dealing with customers in this

environment: Not so fun

If you are not feeling overextended at work (if so, congratulations), you have
undoubtedly noticed that workers at the places you frequent are. Take a look
around next time you go to the pharmacy, where there are probably a handful
of people on staff; one working the register, one restocking, and one running
around trying to unlock all the deodorant and shampoo that stores have
decided to lock up as part of a “loss prevention” strategy they’re not staffed
enough to execute. Or maybe you’ve made a mistake at the self-checkout and
now have to wait for assistance, in which case, good luck.

Many consumers are, understandably, finding themselves frustrated with staff

shortages causing longer waits and worse service across multiple sectors.
Workers in those sectors often bear the brunt of that frustration, so on top of
being overworked, they’re treated cruelly and even abusively by customers.
And American consumers do not exactly have the best reputation for being
extra-considerate in the first place.

When the pandemic hit, the convenience store Nichole works for in
Wisconsin “just ran with who we had” and kept open with their limited staff.
Customers were less than thrilled. “A lot of people in the world are very
angry, and they’re not understanding that we’re short-staffed, so they don’t
like to wait in line for an extra few minutes. And then they take it out on us,
and we get yelled at,” she said. “The morale goes down when we get yelled at
every day by customers.”

She’s an assistant manager and estimates she’s putting in an extra 25 to 30

hours each week because they can’t find people to hire — and because she
wants to give her burnt-out staff some reprieve. “I can’t ask them to put even
more hours in,” she said. She’s a single mother of two, so she also feels
guilty that when she gets to be with her children, they don’t do much because
she’s so tired.

While the vast majority of people in the country spend much of their lives as
workers, many Americans still view themselves primarily as consumers.
Through that consumer lens, they often have excessively high expectations
— expectations they’ve sort of been trained into by companies. When
those expectations aren’t met, they experience it as a loss. The customer has
been told for decades that they’re always right, they’ve come to believe it,
and now that they’re met with snags in that framework, they lash out.

“Other countries have a more balanced view on ‘the customer is always

right,’ and that’s somewhere that we can dig in as a society,” Melissa Swift,
US transformation leader at Mercer, a work consultancy firm, told me in an
interview earlier this year. “Why do we believe that? That doesn’t have to
be a baseline assumption.”

Nichole said her store has had two workers walk out of the job because of
rude customers recently. When I asked her what she wanted consumers to
know about workers in situations like hers, she said to “maybe find a way to
get the word out there to people that we’re short-staffed so that we’re not
getting yelled at.” She had an addendum: “If you’re going to be a dick, don’t
come back.”

If there’s a light at the end of the

tunnel, workers want to know when
In the current moment, it really does feel like everyone is overextended at
work. Across industries, from health care to education to hospitality,
workers say it’s just too much.

Kevin, a professor at a midsized university in the Midwest, saw many of his

colleagues and administrative staff let go at the start of the pandemic, and on
top of the normal turnover, staffing rates just haven’t rebounded. He finds
himself spending hours trying to help contractors navigate IT issues instead
of where he’s supposed to be: teaching in the classroom. “Everybody’s like,
‘We’re all doing more with less,’ and it’s like, okay, but when are we not
going to be doing more with less?” he said. “You can always deal with things
when there’s some sort of end date to it, but right now, it doesn’t feel like
there’s an end date.”

The pandemic has, of course, contributed to much of worker burnout, but

that’s not the only thing in play here. While workers currently are supposed
to have more power than they have in recent years because the labor market
is so tight, for many of them, work hasn’t really changed much at all, or
has gotten worse. Structurally, policy solutions that could give workers some
more weight in the employer-employee dynamic — such as making it easier
to unionize or updating the unemployment insurance system — haven’t
happened.

And so, things are worse. When there’s one server at a restaurant trying to do
the work of what used to be three, it’s annoying for that server and for the
diners. The office worker now working remotely might enjoy the time they’re
saving in their commute, but many are just filling that supposedly saved
time with longer hours because they are now a team of one. It’s a bad
situation for everyone involved — well, almost everyone.

On perhaps the broadest level, the point of a company is to make money for
its owners and its shareholders. That can translate to a dynamic of trying to
squeeze as much out of workers for as little as possible. Squeezing them may
not make them more productive — as Mazzola explained, longer working
hours can actually lead to less productive workers over time — but it might
still mean more money for the people at the top. Even if things are worse for
customers and workers, paying less in wages for nearly the same productivity
is a boon for balance sheets.

The situation isn’t a particularly new one — long before the pandemic, many
employers have been pulling as much as possible from their workers, piling
task upon task on them that often used to be shared responsibilities. Now,
more workers are starting to reach their breaking points, or at least to talk
about it. But talking about the burden only goes so far if the burden — and
the extractive, capitalistic system at the root of it — isn’t addressed.