"The Great Resignation" would be a good book title
And one that I'm sure some clever author will steal for their re-imagining of CS Lewis's The Great Divorce. Instead of a rainy town as purgatory, it's a rainy office two months after all employees were forced back after working from home. They've changed everything to an open floor plan with no set work areas. There's not a vaccine mandate, but the shared kitchen and snacks are off-limits though, "for hygiene." There are 3-hour mandatory meetings every Friday, until some manager hears rumors of unionizing, and then there are 4-hour mandatory "town halls." Instead of a bus driven by Jesus up to the foothills of Heaven, it's a bus to a mandatory company retreat driven by a butch lesbian named Leroy. Nobody's actually sure who planned the retreat; they all got the email on the same day, signed by different HR managers who don't seem to exist.
Okay, maybe I'll write that book. It would fit nicely into the LitenVerse.
As a millennial who lived through the dot-com bubble and the great recession and then the Covid-19 depression, I've been reading tales of the Great Resignation with -- like most of us -- immeasurable amounts of schadenfreude. I don't know anyone in my generation that didn't bounce from terrible job to terrible job their entire working lives; that hasn't dealt with abusive bosses and customers, harassment, wage theft, blatant racism, passive-aggression, or the weird flip-flopping between "we're like a family!" to "I don't care that your father died or your child is running a fever, I need you to come in on your day off." Out of my own long, lengthy, and weird resume that spans two decades, I have only enjoyed...maybe three of those? And only felt valued at one. (And it's the one I'm at--fully remote, flexible hours, pays well, company culture of trust and chill, and my boss sent me flowers for my wedding. I'm never leaving.)
It says a lot (and nothing good) that instead of that, the best most of us hope for at a job is ambivalence: that we're expected to spend the majority of our waking hours in the majority of our weeks at a place that we...don't hate ALL the time.
And then we all had 18 months to stew in the existential angst of that. Of course people are dumping their jobs like they're loser boyfriends.
My worry, of course, is that the current movement towards quitting jobs will never grow beyond its "how about fuck you" discourse; that it'll keep returning to the idea of workers as individuals, responsible for setting up and enforcing personal boundaries, rather than acting collectively to force companies, managers, and employers to change, demanding labor reforms from the government. I'm dreaming otherwise, of course; and because I'm me, that looks like daydreaming about a Great Resignation Litenverse novella.
News:
My essay "The Bad Dad Redemption Arc Needs to Die" was published at Uncanny Magazine. It's about bad dads in movies, and the bad dad in my life, and why we need better stories about dads in general
Voting is open for the Hugo Awards, and you can vote for my book FINNA in the Best Novella category, if you're a member of Worldcon. Voting is open until November 19.
Crononauta, a Spanish SFF publisher, has translated my short story "The Shape of My Name." Their Patreon supporters can read "La Forma de Mi Nombre" en español along with with an interview in English. This is my first official Spanish translation, and I'm so happy it's with Crononauta, who do really cool work.
NYC residents can come see me, my beloved Nibedita Sen, and several other awesome writers at the Sphnyx Horror Salon tonight!
On November 6, I'll be speaking on a panel for Writing the Other that's all about sensitivity readers: what they do, how to find one, when in the writing process to talk to one. Come join us! Registration is sliding scale.