First it was the Great Resignation, now it’s the Great Retirement – so why are people choosing to quit work?

The biggest group dropping out of the labour market are the 50- to 64-year-olds, writes Hamish McRae

Across the UK and US, changes to the job market are causing people to quit (Getty)

Do I really want to go on doing this? It is a question that many people on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have asked themselves in the two years since the pandemic struck, and for a significant number the answer seems to be no. They have fallen out of the job market. So what happens then?

The UK unemployment rate, at 3.7 per cent, is now the lowest since 1947. For the first time since the numbers were recorded, there are more unfilled vacancies than there are registered unemployed. So for almost everyone this is the tightest job market that has existed during their working lives – and that affects employers, which are struggling to find ways of attracting people to work for them.

A similar thing is happening in America, where unemployment is at 3.6 per cent, which aside from a dip to 3.5 per cent in February 2020, is the lowest since the late 1960s. In Europe the pattern is somewhat different for unemployment which is much higher, at 6.8 per cent in the Eurozone. But by historical standards, this is the lowest since the euro was introduced in 1999, lower even than just before the pandemic hit. So just about everywhere there seems to be a huge demand for labour but apparently not enough people to do the jobs. Why?