Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said Friday that the "quiet quitting" trend, where workers meet only the minimum requirements to keep their jobs, is not a concern with employers throughout the country with whom he has spoken.
"I haven't really heard about it from companies," Walsh said during a televised interview for Yahoo Finance last week. "I know it's being reported in the press. Certainly, it's a concern if it continues on, because when people hire people, they expect them to do a day's work for a day's pay."
Walsh said, however, that in the many trips he has recently taken around the country, no one from any of the companies has brought the topic up as a concern.
A Gallup Poll Sept. 6 found that as much as half the American workforce may make up the "quiet quitters," who are not putting out the "extra effort" of collaborating with co-workers or customers.
The organization said that these include 18% of the workforce that claimed in the second quarter of the year to be "disengaged" with their jobs, bringing the ratio of engaged to disengaged workers to 1.8 to 1, the lowest it's been in almost a decade.
According to the Gallup report, the disengagement ran concurrently with the "Great Resignation" in 2021, where many employees left their current position for a higher paying job, or left the workforce.
The numbers also fall in line with an historic drop in worker productivity in the second quarter of the year, falling 4.1%, the highest since 1948 when the number was first recorded, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Sept. 1.
The Gallup survey found that the largest demographic of those not happy at their jobs included managers and workers under the age of 35.
In its latest jobs report for September, the bureau reported 263,000 jobs created, and a drop in the unemployment rate to 3.5%.
The increase came from the hospitality, healthcare, and manufacturing industries, according to the agency.
"When you see the areas that we saw growth in this month — and we saw the hospital industry and medical fully recovered from pre-pandemic — you're seeing that a lot of people are hiring in those hospitals because there's a lot of elective procedures that were put off," Walsh said. "So, they're hiring more people in hospitals.
"We're seeing an increase in manufacturing. Certainly, more jobs than pre-pandemic in manufacturing. And I think a lot of that has to do with what happened during the pandemic with supply chain."
Walsh said that despite the reported resignations or "quiet quitting" trends, companies are still looking for employees.
"Companies are still looking for people," Walsh said. "You are hearing it every day."
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