More Workers Quit Than Were Laid Off In March

In the Wall Street Journal they reported that more U.S. workers quit their jobs than were laid off in March, the second month in a row this occurred and a sign of employees’ growing confidence that more positions are becoming available in a slowly recovering job market.

Although I truly trust the Journal as a trusted news source, in my experience as an Executive Coach working in a wide range of Fortune 500 companies I couldn’t disagree more strongly with the Journal’s reporting. Over the last 18 months other data has been released from a variety of sources reporting that worker dissatisfaction has risen sharply and the highest in decades. What if this exodus of the workforce is due less to worker “confidence” and more to do with the issues I see in large organizations every day:

Workers who are afraid of their own future as they see co-workers laid off – in some cases – by the thousands

These same workers who remain on the job being “coached” to do “more with less” i.e., do their jobs, their former co-workers job and in many cases, the jobs of subordinates who were also laid off

And finally, the combined stresses of issues # 1 & 2 being simply too much to bear.

During a recent cross-country flight I had the good fortune of sitting in FIrst Class and seated next to an executive of a large, global company in the Agri business who vented about the aforementioned issues and ended by saying both she and her Peers at work now have one big question they face every day; “What work, task or project do I KNOW I can’t finish today …?” That is the reality of today’s tough economic times and the lay-offs and other resource cut-backs occurring in US businesses.

The Journal went on to say that nearly 1.9 million employees quit in March compared with more than 1.8 million who were laid-off or discharged, the Labor Department said Tuesday. February, they went on to say, marked the first month since November 2008 when the number who quit was larger than the number who were laid off or discharged.

“The most positive thing, certainly, is hiring activity finally started to pick up,” said Harm Bandholz, a UniCredit Research economist. But “companies are still very cautious.” Cautious is an understatement. In late-2009 a survey of The CEO Roundtable, a group of CEO’s representing some of America’s largest and most successful companies, revealed that 40% of them saw things getting worse, not better, in 2010 and that same 40% saw more lay-offs coming, not growth, as the White House keeps telling us.

The Labor Department noted that, “The quits rate can serve as a measure of workers’ willingness or ability to change jobs.” I disagree. Recent numbers around those who are unemployed who simply quit looking for a job jumped. Further, there are hundreds of thousand of “the uncounted” who run small businesses that have lost their businesses but would never show up in any Labor Department statistics.  And let’s not forget that those who are either ineligible to collect unemployment or, those who’s benefits simply run out are also not counted.

Both figures—the number who quit and those who were laid off—rose slightly in March, compared with the prior month, but quits have been outpacing those who were discharged in recent months largely because the pace of layoffs has slowed from its peak during the recession, the article went on to say.

On a positive note, perhaps, the number of hires was also larger than the number of total separations, which include quits, layoffs and retirements. Separations increased 1.2% to 4 million in March from February.

Jobs still aren’t easy to find. There were just 2.7 million job openings in March and 5.6 unemployed persons per available job as employers have shied away from widespread hiring.

Small businesses have been particularly reluctant to add to their ranks. An index of small-business optimism rose 3.8 points to 90.6 in April, the National Federation of Independent Business said Tuesday. Despite the improvement, owners surveyed said that, on net, they shed more workers than they added for the 27th consecutive month.

Perhaps the government numbers need a bit of a scrubbing, further inclusion of the uncounted and, perhaps some version of an “exit interview” that goes beyond speculation as to why more workers quit rather than look only at numbers. Doing so may shed some real light on what is afoot here.