Companies Are In Trouble After Pandemic Gave Millions Of Americans A Taste Of Freedom

A new poll has revealed that major corporations could be facing a "Great Resignation" period, where workers decide to take their lives in different directions. The economic and health impacts from the pandemic have been discussed at length, but there is also a mental health aspect that hasn't been adequately addressed. For working people who suddenly found themselves with more free time to correct their work-life balance, the thought of going back to work at a regular 9 to 5 pace is certainly not something they want to do. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The pandemic has brought a lot of things into the spotlight. Obviously our physical health has been one. Mental health of individuals feeling, you know, separated from society is certainly a big one. And of course the economic impacts that families across the country have felt. But there's another aspect that has been completely ignored and now a new Axios poll has sent corporations and employers into a bit of a panic. New poll shows that anywhere between 25% and 40% of the American workforce is considering quitting their jobs now that they're all required to go back because they suddenly got a taste of freedom. Here's what's happening and the poll didn't necessarily explain this. This really is my interpretation of this and this is what a lot of economists are saying too. People got a taste of freedom. Now I know, again, we have plenty of individuals who started to get cabin fever working from home. They didn't have a partner. They didn't have roommates. They didn't have kids. They were lonely and yes, that is a severe mental health crisis as well. But on the flip side of that, there were people who felt better. My blood pressure has never been lower in my entire adult life than it has in the last year.

There's been rough times, sure. But like millions of other Americans, we got a taste of what it was like to finally have a better work-life balance where life outweighed work. Where we could spend more time with our families, getting to know them, having a little bit of freedom and most importantly, for millions of people, realizing that you're just arbitrarily being stuck behind a desk for eight hours a day even though there's not eight hours a day worth of work to be doing. When you work from home, you do the things that have to be done, but you don't have all the busy work, all the crap work, all the time of sitting there staring at your computer looking at funny memes on the internet. Don't tell me I'm wrong because I know I'm right here. And that's why we have so many Americans today, now that they're having to go back to the office, go back to wherever they were working, they realize I don't want this anymore. I want out, I want that freedom back and I need to find out what I can do to get that freedom back. So I think rather than face these mass resignations, which would be tens of millions of workers across the country, I think more businesses need to move to the work from home model for good.

I have accomplished more from my job in the last year than I ever did being parked behind a desk at the office. Now I love my job. I'm not one of the people, by the way, thinking of resigning, but I did get a really, really good taste of that work-life balance. Being here, making breakfast for my kids every morning before they went to school, waiting outside for them to get off the school bus every single day, instead of sending them to after-school care, little things like that make a big difference and millions of people experienced that and they want to keep that. There's going to be a worker crisis soon, adding on to the problems of the worker crisis that's already taking place because companies don't want to pay people enough money to work for them.