Surprise: The number of people resigning in 2020 the first year of the corona crisis, rose by 60%

Contrary to expectations, the number of people resigning in 2020, the first year of the corona crisis, rose by 60%. This is despite the severe unemployment crisis. Between 2014 and 2019, there was a steady increase in the rate of resignations from 12% to 16% of all job seekers. But these were mainly strong job seekers with high skills and academic occupations. However, during the Corona crisis, there was a large increase in the proportion of low-wage and unskilled resigners. This is what the employment service report shows. The service explains the phenomenon by guaranteeing the payment of unemployment benefits for a year, which allowed many of the low-wage earners to resign.
In the last decade and especially since 2016, the rate of resignations has started to rise significantly from 11.8% of all job seekers in 2014 to 16.1% in 2019. This situation characterizes a labor market in a strong and growing economy with a low unemployment rate and a high rate of job vacancies. In such a situation, employees with an academic career and high skills are offered a bargaining position, which allows them to resign in order to get a better job.
"People have started thinking about what they want to do with themselves," says Dr. Gal Zohar, director of research and policy at the Employment Service. “They were looking for themselves. There has been much more rethinking of whether your goal is to keep the job or job promotion. Is the job right for you, does it need to change professions. ” But, as mentioned, the phenomenon was characterized mainly by strong workers.
If there was an expectation that in the Corona crisis workers would hold on to their job at any cost, it was false. As mentioned, the number of resignations increased from 29,300 in 2019 to 47,100 in 2020, the first year of Korna, an increase of 60%. The rate of resignations from all job seekers (excluding non-governmental workers) jumped from 16.1% in 2019 to 22.3%. By 2021, it already stands at 22.6%. If in 2019 the number of resigners was 29% higher than in 2012, in 2020 it is already 107, which is more than double.
Most of the increase is due to a jump in the number of low-wage, low-skilled, older and peripheral socio-economic clusters. This is a population that before the Corona crisis did not allow itself to resign due to the lack of alternatives. It should be noted that the resigners did so despite the fact that three months pass from the resignation to entitlement to unemployment benefits. This fact has another meaning, and that is that there are probably many more resigners who move to another job within a month or two, and therefore do not register at all with the employment service because they do not expect unemployment benefits. They do not appear in the data.
The Employment Service believes that the main reason for the increase in the number of resignations is a promise made by the government in July 2020 to provide the Corona unemployed with unemployment benefits by the end of June 2021, ie for a full year. As time goes on, this promise, made by then-Finance Minister Israel Katz from the Likud and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, turns out to be a serious economic mistake. Already over the past year it has become clear that she has greatly delayed the return of many unemployed to work and now it turns out that she has also encouraged mass resignation.
The employment service explains that "many of the retirees preferred not to receive a wage for three months, but then to enjoy unemployment benefits until June 2021, especially low-wage earners, whose gap between the wage and the level of benefit to which they are entitled is not large."
In this context, it is impossible not to refer to the explanation that came up during the crisis and the employment service does not raise it, and it is the possibility that many moved to work in the black at the same time as receiving unemployment benefits. Such a move could justify the waiver of a three-month annuity. It is also very suitable for an increase in the number of resigning in Arab society where black labor is more prevalent. "There is a situation where people have resigned to work in the black," says Zohar. "But we can't identify them." The report deals with resigning. But we will never know how many employees received a letter of dismissal from their employer and continued to work for him in black.
It turns out that in Corona there has been a large increase in the resignation of the least expected workers. Usually the rate of resigning among older workers is very low due to their difficulty in finding a replacement job. In Corona, the number of resigning persons aged 55 and over jumped by 68%, while the number of resigning persons aged 54-35 increased by only 23% and among young people up to the age of 34 by 35%. The employment service estimates that adults' fear of contracting Corona has also affected the rise in the resignation rate.
Until the crisis there was a high rate of resignations mainly among those with academic occupations, especially because they provide more employment opportunities. The crisis has seen a jump in the number of resignations even among occupations where employment opportunities are much fewer. For example, there was an increase of about 151% in the rate of resignations in the agricultural, forestry and fishing professions, an increase of about 78% in the percentage of retirees who are craftsmen in industry and construction and an increase of about 73% among unskilled workers.
The service also examined the probability of resignation of employees of different types. The probability of the employee resigning from the strong groups did not change during the Corona crisis, but the probability of resigning employees from the weak groups increased greatly.
If before the crisis the chances of resigning of an employee without digital skills were 30% lower than that of an employee with digital skills, then after the crisis the gap dropped to 21%. Before the crisis, the chances of an employee without an academic education resigning were 34% lower than that of an academic. During the crisis, the gap dropped to 18%. The gap between the chances of resignation of an employee from a non-academic profession and an employee in an academic profession decreased from 78% to 47%. The gap between the chances of an Arab and a non-Haredi Jew resigning dropped from 117% to 89%. The service notes, however, that the probability of high-skilled people resigning is still much higher. Zohar notes that "one of the things we see in times of prolonged crises is a kind of rethinking of people about work, the job, their careers about work and family relationships."
The employment service offers several more explanations for the unusual phenomenon of low-wage resignations. One explanation is that taking employees on leave without compulsory pay, as well as other forms of harm to working conditions, such as job cuts, harmed employees' loyalty to the employer. Another explanation: the corona has created a phenomenon of attrition in three out of four workers in the economy due to the multiplicity of tasks and the extension of working hours.