How much of the liquidy is caused by changing social norms among workers and workers taking advantage of better work opportunities and how much is caused by an unstable job market(with unions losing power) caused by CEOs? Mass layoffs were not always a "thing." They are traumatic to those who get layed off and those who witness layoffs of their friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors without getting layed off themselves.
I think it has as much to do with a corporate shift away from pensions and other considerations for long-term employees. For my entire professional career I've been warned that there is no one else looking out for me but me. There will be no pension when I retire, and no social security, I'm told. So I have to maximize what I earn and what I save now in order to survive later.
Is it any wonder then that my generation has absolutely no sense of loyalty to their employer and show a pathological willingness to jump at almost anything that pays more or has better growth potential?
What benefit is there to an employee that would encourage them to stay with one employer? (To be fair...I've been with my employer for about 10 years, so YMMV.)
The shift away from pensions is caused mainly by laws (e.g. ERISA) requiring companies to properly account for them. Defined benefit pensions are both extremely expensive and very risky, but companies were allowed to hide these losses and risks off the balance sheets in the past.
And, as the author of the piece says, if you did have an overstuffed pension fund that caused problems too both with the IRS and because of LBOs.
Of course, a lot of benefits choices are driven by laws/accounting rules/taxes. Ideally companies want to give benefits that cost them less (however they look at cost) than their value to the employee. Once that balance flips, that benefit makes a lot less sense.
That said, a benefit structure that assumes long-term employment with a single company doesn't make a lot of sense for most people or most companies today. (Though I'm probably unusual among this readership is that I actually will have a modest pension from a past employer.)
But most employers in the developed world shifted to defined contribution benefits ages ago. I was part of that first generation of workers to be told that my pension was going to be a moveable feast and not something that I could have specific expectations about, and that was back in the early 90s. Defined benefits pensions are indeed still expensive for companies and local governments that owe them to older workers, but they've been moving away from taking on such obligations for a long time now.
The shift to 401K is more about the financial industry rigging the system so that they have more of other people's money to play with. Need a bigger slush fund? Lobby Congress to make pensions unfeasible through carefully constructed legislation and wait 10 years for the payoff to start rolling in.
Yeah, I'd say that employee loyalty's dropoff kind of trails the dropoff in employer loyalty. Like when companies started using backdoors to raid pension funds and pay out executive bonuses with them that was not the result of some newfound job-hopping tendency in retired workers.
