Perhaps not since Johnny Paycheck belted out his 1977 hit – “Take This Job and Shove It” – has worker discontent been so front and center in the American consciousness.

The nation’s quit rate – the share of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs – hit a record 2.9% in August. Microsoft predicts 41% of workers globally are considering leaving their employers. A recent Harris Poll finds that half of workers in the United States want to make a career change. 

In a sign of the new combativeness, the AFL-CIO labor federation last month put up a map on its website, showing nearly 30 locations where strikes are underway, from big employers like Kellogg and John Deere to the 75 musicians picketing the San Antonio Symphony.

The frustration isn’t limited to union workers. In 12 cities last month, hundreds of McDonald’s employees walked off the job to protest sexual harassment in the workplace. Netflix recently fired an employee who was organizing a walkout over the company’s airing of comedian Dave Chappelle’s special, which gay and transgender people have found highly objectionable.

Some have dubbed this worker revolt the Great Resignation; others, Striketober. The idea is that the worker shortage has swung leverage from companies to workers and hit a reset button on 40 years of rising corporate power.

“We’ve never seen levels of discontent with work the way we’re seeing today,” says Toby Higbie, a professor of history and labor studies at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Reasons for the gap

While many workers are fed up with their current or former employer – or at least now feel the freedom to express it – there are other reasons unemployed Americans haven’t flocked back more quickly to the factory floor, the cashier line, and the office cubicle. One factor is the pandemic itself, which has scared off many from returning to work. Others have used this time to re-imagine their work lives and are prioritizing new careers or even goals outside of work, such as spending more time with family. Then there’s the mismatch between jobs workers had been doing, which no longer exist, and the positions that employers are now offering.  

Nathan J. Fish/The Las Cruces Sun News/AP

School bus drivers strike in front of their employer's building in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on Oct. 28, 2021. During the pandemic, workers are feeling enhanced bargaining power in many frontline, public-facing occupations.

“There really is no labor shortage,” says Alí Bustamante, deputy director of the Education, Jobs, and Worker Power program at the Roosevelt Institute. “When you see the evidence that there’s over 5 million jobs missing from the economy relative to February prior to the pandemic, I think what you’re actually seeing is there’s a considerable amount of displaced workers whose jobs haven’t returned.”

Some of the industries that lost the most jobs as the pandemic began are also the ones that are having a hard time filling open positions: frontline occupations requiring extensive contact with people. Examples include leisure and hospitality, education services, and local government. Those jobs may be perceived as more dangerous during the pandemic.

Undoubtedly, some laid-off workers used extra federal unemployment benefits to avoid work. But that does not appear to have been much of a factor in the Great Resignation, said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist for Oxford Economics in New York, speaking at a recent webinar sponsored by the National Association for Business Economics (NABE). In any case, those extra benefits expired by September.

More important are long-term social and demographic trends, such as the retirement of baby boomers,  the ongoing challenges for working mothers searching for child care, the declining labor participation of men, and the fall in fertility and immigration. Most of these trends were exacerbated by the pandemic; all of them predate it. 

Rising leverage

These trends give those in the labor force added power. With 2 million more job openings than unemployed people, Americans can be choosier about picking a job. They have more leverage to request higher pay and better hours. Wages have begun to rise, starting with the lowest-paid employees and now spreading throughout the economy. 

For employers, used to having the upper hand for most of the past 40 years, the Great Resignation is demanding a rethinking of employee relations. According to an outline released Sunday, Deere is offering to boost wages 10%, double its last contract proposal, and to keep a pension program for new hires that it originally planned to drop. 

John Raoux/AP/File

Workers and family members take part in a walkout to demand $15-an-hour wages, on May 19, 2021, in Sanford, Florida. McDonald’s workers in 12 U.S. cities walked off the job on Oct. 26, 2021, to protest what they say is a continuing problem of sexual harassment and violence in the company’s stores. Organizers from the labor group Fight for $15 said several hundred workers had been expected to participate.

Permanent problem or a passing phase?

Economists are divided over whether these trends mean a permanently smaller workforce – and thus continued worker shortages and inflation – or whether they will be reversed by a growing labor force that will staff most of those open positions. Emsi, a labor market data company with headquarters in Boston and Moscow, Idaho, has dubbed this era the beginning of a “sansdemic” – a future where the U.S. won’t have enough workers and thus will see reduced growth.  

“I’m in the optimist camp,” Julia Coronado, founder and president of New York research firm MacroPolicy Perspectives, countered at the NABE webinar. “The labor market is incredibly flexible.”

For example, during the pandemic, Oxford Economics estimates that the labor force lost an extra 2.5 million to 2.7 million boomers over and above the normal retirement rate. But much of that shortfall did not come from a slew of extra retirements; it came because the normal flow of retired boomers who typically reenter the labor force dried up during the pandemic. If coronavirus caseloads continue to fall, it’s not unreasonable to think that those retirees will feel safe reentering the workforce, Ms. Coronado says.

It’s not just retirees who may return. New research suggests that there is a shadow workforce, and that for every drop of 1 percentage point in the unemployment rate, there is a rise of two-thirds of a point in the size of the labor force. Workers who had quit looking for jobs during a recession begin looking again. But there’s a lag. Unemployment has to fall considerably before the labor force begins to grow again. If the pattern of previous recessions holds true this time, the growth in the labor force should begin quite soon, Ms. Coronado says, because the unemployment rate fell below 5% in September.

“There’s a solution for this”

Over time, that should diminish workers’ leverage and ease wage increases. And as long as productivity growth remains strong, inflation should also stay in check. While workers will be paid more per hour, they’ll also be producing more per hour.

For the moment, power rests with workers. Wages are starting to rise throughout the economy, says Mr. Daco of Oxford Economics. Just last week, warehouse club Costco started to boost pay to a minimum $17 per hour. Coffee chain Starbucks said it would raise minimum wages to $15 an hour next summer.   

Caleb Jones/AP

Highway Inn restaurant host Ku'uipo Lorenzo (left) seats two customers on Oct. 25, 2021, in Honolulu. Across the nation, employer demand for workers means that restaurant wages are rising faster than average pay in the rest of the economy. To cope, many restaurateurs are boosting prices or incorporating technology such as online ordering.

In restaurants, one of the industries hardest hit by the pandemic, wages are rising at double the rate for workers overall, says Hudson Riehle, senior vice president for research at the National Restaurant Association in Washington. For the leisure and hospitality sector as a whole, which includes restaurant workers, they’ve risen a record 7.4% over the past year.

To cope, restaurateurs are boosting menu prices, increasing curbside takeout and delivery options (which tend to generate more revenue per worker than a traditional server), and incorporating new technology such as digital menus and online ordering. Some are farming out their delivery to so-called ghost kitchens – central commissaries that prepare and deliver food for one or many restaurants.

By itself, such automation is unlikely to end the worker shortage anytime soon. Nevertheless, a more efficient and better-paid workplace may be just the ticket to lure jobless people back from the unemployment rolls.

“Open up any newspaper today, [you see] the labor shortage, the labor shortage, the labor shortage!” says Andrew Schrank, a professor of international and public affairs at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “Is it a labor shortage or is it a wage shortage? There’s a solution for this.”

Jackeane dos Santos Leite leans over a thin plank of wood, her brow furrowed above her plastic goggles. Carefully, she traces the shape of a spatula before powering up a small electric saw.

“I’ve only used this one a few times,” she says through the cloud of sawdust, her hands unsteady as she cuts into the tauari, or Brazilian oak wood. “The shape has to be just right.”

On a scorching afternoon, deep in the Brazilian Amazon, Ms. Leite is learning the art of woodcrafting from a trio of designers from Rio de Janeiro, visiting the riverside village of São Francisco das Chagas do Caribi for the occasion. Wearing hard hats and earmuffs, eight trainees busily cut, carve, sand, and polish wood under the guidance of the experts.

The village is an unlikely setting for a workshop like this. Once an illegal logging hub, the region lost some of its most valued tree varieties a few decades ago, before the authorities turned it into a protected reserve spanning hundreds of thousands of acres.

Now, residents hope the training will help kick-start a new woodworking venture. By making tableware such as platters and spoons from legally harvested timber, they hope to earn income from the forest without destroying it. 

“This makes me think of my grandfather,” Ms. Leite says over the rattle of the generator powering the tools. A longtime settler, “he made canoes; he made everything. But things are really different now. We’re doing things legally.”

A glimmer of hope

This tiny victory, on the front lines of the battle to save the Amazon, offers a glimmer of hope as the world scrambles to slash carbon emissions and defuse the climate emergency.

World leaders meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, at the COP26 United Nations climate summit have also taken up the challenge. On Monday they pledged to halt deforestation by 2030, and to spend $19 billion on the effort, including on projects, much like the woodworking venture here, that “enhance rural livelihoods ... through ... recognition of the multiple values of forests.”

Pledges are just pledges, though, and a similar international agreement in 2014 has had little impact. And for all the hard-fought efforts of Ms. Leite and her neighbors, swaths of the Brazilian Amazon are still being cleared and burned at a breakneck pace. Deforestation has hit its highest level in a decade, pushing Brazil’s emissions up 9.6% in 2020, even as the pandemic froze economies and triggered a short-lived emissions dip elsewhere in the world, a new report shows.

Ana Ionova

Trainees learn the art of woodcrafting at a workshop in the village of São Francisco das Chagas do Caribi, in Brazil’s Amazon. The workshop, held by three designers from Rio de Janeiro, is part of an initiative to help communities in the reserve build new, sustainable income streams that don’t rely on forest destruction.

Often dubbed the “lungs of the planet,” the Amazon is one of the world’s most important carbon sinks, absorbing about 2 billion metric tons of CO2 per year. But parts of it now emit more carbon than they capture, and scientists warn the rainforest is coming dangerously close to a tipping point at which it will turn into a savanna, with devastating results for the climate, locally and globally.

Many blame President Jair Bolsonaro, who has hitherto defied all global calls to curb deforestation while gutting Brazil’s environmental agencies. Under his watch, fines for environmental crimes fell to their lowest in over two decades. Mr. Bolsonaro has also vowed to open up protected forests and Indigenous lands to exploitation, which his critics say has emboldened cattle ranchers, wildcat miners, and land-grabbers.

“There's a total lack of environmental control,” says Rômulo Batista, a campaigner for Greenpeace Brazil. “And the government has done little to stop it. In fact, it has undertaken a project to dismantle Brazil’s environmental policies.”

Against this backdrop, many observers remain skeptical of Mr. Bolsonaro’s promises and Brazil's signature on yesterday’s COP26 deal. “He is giving speeches, trying to make the world believe that he’s taking action,” Mr. Batista adds. “But there is nothing to back these promises.”

Better days ahead?

Still, it’s not too late for Brazil to rein in deforestation, which accounts for nearly half of the country’s carbon emissions. Most experts agree that will require a return to tougher environmental policing, including clear signals from the top that illegal encroachments into the forest will not be tolerated.

Cattle ranching and agriculture – the largest drivers of deforestation – must also be transformed, increasing productivity and making use of degraded land. And, to achieve long-term change, it is crucial that more sustainable local economies be fostered, so that those living in the Amazon have ways to earn a living without razing the forest.

Leo Correa/AP/File

Highway BR-163 stretches between the Tapajos National Forest (left) and a soy field in Brazil. Brazil signed on to an international pledge to halt deforestation by 2030, announced on Monday at the United Nations' COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

“Communities in the Amazon play a key role ... in mitigating the climate crisis,” says André Vianna, head of forest technologies and management at Idesam, a nonprofit organization developing projects in the Brazilian Amazon. “But they need to have sustainable sources of income in order to stay in their territories and preserve them.”

And small successes like the one in São Francisco das Chagas do Caribi suggest a way forward. With support from Idesam and other nonprofit groups, residents opened an eco-lodge in 2019, hoping to earn sustainable income through tourism. Recently, they also built a refinery for essential oils extracted from the forest, to be sold in shops hundreds of miles away.

“Today we know that, by taking care of the forest, we can earn a lot more than by toppling trees,” says Dona Elisângela Conceição Cavalcante, who runs the eco-lodge. “So today, knowing what's right, nobody wants to do harm.”

When COVID-19 hit tourism, things got tough for local people. Earlier this year, nongovernmental organizations helped residents set up the woodworking shop that they hope to turn into another significant source of income. Villagers are hoping that the designers will introduce their tableware to customers in cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, boosting their sales.

“We are looking to put to use the community’s traditional knowledge of timber and of the forest,” says Mr. Vianna. “And we’re helping them with the know-how needed to market their products, so they can get a better price.”

Gracilázaro Rodrigues Miranda, a local resident who is one of the project leaders, spent over two decades logging forest in the Amazon, sometimes felling trees illegally. Now, he says the community is working hard to tap forest resources sustainably, using only timber from a licensed area of the reserve where limited extraction is allowed.

“We didn’t know how to preserve the forest before,” Mr. Miranda says. “Now, we know legal timber is much better; it’s the way forward for us.”

Back at the workshop, Ms. Cavalcante, the lodge keeper, shreds a jungle vine into long, wispy fibers that will become bristles on a wooden cleaning brush. She knows saving the Amazon is an uphill battle, with the odds stacked against her. But, she believes her small village – and others like it – can make a difference.

“I believe we have huge power to change our reality,” she says. “So I still have hope for better days ahead – for us and for the world.”

John Minchillo/AP/File

Poll workers inspect and count absentee ballots in New York, Nov. 10, 2020. Following record turnout in the 2020 presidential election, more than 425 bills restricting voter access have been introduced in 49 states during this year’s legislative sessions.

Last week, in response to the Senate’s failure to bring important voting rights legislation to the floor for debate, NAACP President Derrick Johnson released a statement that challenged Congress and the Biden administration:

Today was another punch in the gut for America. The failure to pass the Freedom to Vote Act is reprehensible. Combined with the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, this bill would have been a necessary step in the right direction for our democracy. But while our democracy dwindles on the edge of a cliff, lawmakers are still finding a way to put partisanship above the country.

A sentence near the end of the statement, in particular, grabbed my attention: “Don’t forget that Black voters landed a victory for this President and this Congress, so don’t fail us again.”

That point is important, but more so ironic: the idea of voting for someone or something that cannot guarantee your right to vote in the future.

I’ve heard the phrase “our democracy is at stake” a lot lately. Mr. Johnson himself suggests that democracy is teetering “on the edge of a cliff.” But the sad truth is that when and where people can’t vote freely and without deterrent, there is an absence of democracy.

America, for Black people, has largely been a land of broken or, at best, tenuous promises. We have generally been taught that the path to equality comes through the ballot box. But we learned it the hard way – by virtue of the ongoing efforts to strip the vote from us through poll taxes, literacy tests, outright intimidation, and so on. The vote is rightfully and righteously sacred to us, because the debt has been paid with literal blood, sweat, and tears.

A history of restricting voting rights

Earlier this year, I wrote about Georgia’s past and present when it comes to voting rights. Last month the Brennan Center for Justice reported that, so far in 2021, at least 19 states have enacted 33 laws that make voting harder – primarily in states where voting was already fairly difficult. Overall, in this year’s legislative sessions, more than 425 bills restricting voter access have been introduced in 49 states. 

As a native of both Georgia and South Carolina, I grew up with the stories of civil rights legends. My Georgia roots remind me of the efforts of the late civil rights champion and Georgia congressman John Lewis, who admittedly “resented” the racial disparities that he witnessed and experienced in his youth:

As I was growing up in rural Alabama, I saw all around me the system of segregation and racial discrimination. … In a little five-and-ten store was a civil fountain, a clean fountain for white people to come and drink water, but in another corner of the store there was a little spigot, a rusty spigot [that] said ‘colored drinking.’ And I became resentful of the signs and all the visible evidence of segregation and racial discrimination.

My South Carolina roots remind me of what happened when Black men gained the right to vote after the Civil War. The Saturday, Nov. 16, 1867, issue of Harper’s Weekly has a depiction of Black men waiting in line, titled “The First Vote.” A number of Black men were elected to public office. In fact, when the South Carolina constitutional convention met in Charleston on Jan. 14, 1868, it did so with a Black majority.   

But these efforts were ultimately decimated by white violence and Jim Crow. Harper’s featured a cartoon in an August 1876 issue with a particularly crass depiction of the Black militiamen who were murdered in the Hamburg Massacre, one of many attacks intended to discourage the Black vote. It would be nearly a century before African Americans saw profound civil rights legislation. 

Vasha Hunt/AP

LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, stands on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, May 8, 2021, in Selma, Alabama. Ms. Brown spoke at the John Lewis Advancement Act Day of Action. The act, named for the late congressman and civil rights activist, would restore the protections of the Voting Rights Act.

Hard-won progress effectively denied

The tireless work of activists yielded three significant acts in the 1960s — the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965, and the Fair Housing Act in 1968. They should be mentioned together because, as Black people have learned, oppression isn’t isolated to a single issue. In legislating a wide range of rights, the acts should unquestionably have preserved the right to vote freely. As President Lyndon Johnson, who signed all three bills into law, said, “It is wrong, deadly wrong, to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of states’ rights or national rights, there is only the struggle for human rights.”

In reality, however, that right has once again been denied. As Mr. Lewis described it, the VRA suffered a “dagger into the heart” with the Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013. In essence, the VRA held future probations against certain states such as Georgia and my native South Carolina. Those states had “preclearance” requirements before they could change voting procedures because of their historical denial of voting and civil rights. But the 2013 ruling made those probations inoperable.

It is ironic that Mr. Lewis’ name is on the act that would restore the protections of the VRA – even in death, he is still in the midst of the fight for our presumed democracy.

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has been dangling the issue of voting rights over Black Americans’ heads like a carrot. Most recently, he co-sponsored the Freedom to Vote Act but is tying the bill’s fate to the Senate filibuster, arguing that voting rights aren’t a partisan issue.

He’s wrong, of course. Voting rights – and civil rights, for that matter – are as much a partisan issue as they are a (broken) promise. The deterrents are seared in America’s history – the rioters who think they’re “redeemers,” the rigging known as gerrymandering, the racist violence.

Saving “the soul of America” 

And then there are the undeterred, the individuals and groups who represent the closest thing we have to democracy. Martin Luther King recalled in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s motto was “To save the soul of America.” He also shared these lines from the “Black bard of Harlem,” Langston Hughes:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!

There is no democracy – and yet democracy is at stake. Congress and America’s leaders are in a position to do something different from the country’s forefathers: to treat Black people and other people of color as full, not partial, Americans.

Passing voting rights legislation might be a low bar for some, but for America, it’s better than no bar. It’s a step toward building an America that Black people have never seen.

Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports NPStrans

Former Toronto Raptors guard Jeremy Lin: "Love will always be the most powerful driving force behind why you do anything, including sports.”

The issue of athletics and mental health gained international attention last summer when Olympic gold medal gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from competing in the Tokyo Olympics. She cited mental health challenges that could have posed a physical danger if she had tried to compete. Earlier this year, tennis star Naomi Osaka had withdrawn from the French Open and passed up Wimbledon due to her own mental health concerns.

Now the ultra-masculine, highly popular NFL has begun to deal with the problem as well. Players around the football league are asking for time off to deal with mental health issues. Philadelphia Eagles right tackle Lane Johnson, for example, recently missed three games dealing with depression and anxiety. Back in the lineup, he told Fox Sports he had been “ashamed” at first to talk about his challenge. Today he urges struggling players to confide in a close friend or family member. “There’s always help around the corner,” he says. “You realize that you have a lot more in common with everybody else around you than you think.”

Growing up male, “you’re always told to toughen up, kind of suck it up and stuff like that,” says New England Patriots linebacker Josh Uche in an article on the team’s website. He’s founded the Josh Uche Foundation to help others confront the kind of mental health issues he has had to deal with. He’s encouraged. “I feel like the tide is changing, and that stigma is starting to soften up a little bit.”

Calvin Ridley, a star receiver for the Atlanta Falcons, just announced that he would step away from the NFL for a period to deal with his challenges. “I need to ... focus on my mental wellbeing,” Mr. Ridley tweeted. “This will help me be the best version of myself now and in the future.”

Helping players be “the best version of themselves” is the mantra of fictional professional soccer coach Ted Lasso on the popular TV show of that same name. In the series’ second season, a star player develops the “yips” and is unable to control his kicks following an accident in which he kills the team mascot, a dog. Conversations with a sports psychologist help him overcome his mental block and restore his love of the game – and his ability to play it.

Comparisons with the yips have been made to Ms. Biles and her concerns about “twisties,” a mental condition in which gymnasts lose the ability to control their movements in midair. Performing while dealing with the twisties is regarded as dangerous.

Former NBA star Jeremy Lin, who has confronted mental health issues of his own, now speaks to audiences on the subject. The causes of mental health challenges in athletes can be many, from the pressure of trying to live up to expectations of family, friends, and fans to the fear of injury or letting down teammates. Even at the height of his popularity, Mr. Lin says, he “was anxious because I wanted to be who everybody else wanted me to be – a mega star who came onto the scene and just broke all these records,” he recently told an audience at the Aspen Institute.

Along with seeking out support, Mr. Lin has come to realize that the best mental approach to a sport is to play “out of a love for the game. Love for people, love for your team, a love for the sport. Love will always be the most powerful driving force behind why you do anything, including sports.”

That’s a powerful message for those playing sports at any level, but especially for professionals who can be dazzled by fame and fortune – and crushed when they are lost. Pro athletes are marvels of physical well-being. Now the importance of their mental well-being is beginning to be seen.