- Official unemployment measures are low, but discontent is broiling under the surface. A measure of worker confidence from Glassdoor just hit its lowest level in nearly a decade amid trade wars and highly publicized layoffs that leave workers insecure and needing to do “more with less.”
Workers haven’t been this pessimistic about the future in nearly a decade, according to new data released by Glassdoor on Tuesday.
Just 44.4% of workers have a positive outlook for their business over the next six months, as measured by the Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index, which offers a choice among positive, negative, or neutral outlook. That’s the lowest figure since Glassdoor launched the tracker in 2016.
“There’s a lot of nervousness among employees around where the economy is headed, and how that might impact work,” Glassdoor Lead Economist Daniel Zhao told Fortune. “Economic anxiety is rising as economic uncertainty is rising.”
Widely publicized government layoffs are a major driver of the miserable mood, Zhao noted: Government and public administration employees reported the biggest drop in confidence, followed by aerospace and defense.
But it’s not just workers’ fear that they will be laid off driving spirits lower, Zhao said. Even those who survived layoffs are grappling with their effects in Glassdoor reviews. “You see a lot of people talking about burnout, being asked to do more with less or struggling with very high expectations and not getting the resources to meet them,” he said.
The contrast with the Great Resignation and Great Reshuffle of just a few years ago, which by many measures was the hottest job market in a generation, only adds insult to injury for many workers, Zhao added. Tens of millions of workers switched employers or went out on their own, ushering in historically strong wage gains; even McDonald’s was offering signing bonuses. “Everybody was talking about labor shortages and it was pretty easy to get a job, a raise, or a promotion,” Zhao says.
“Experiencing that shift in power toward employers makes the current situation feel even worse because people know what is possible and now they feel like they’ve lost that.” In another data point, two in three workers told Glassdoor in a separate survey they feel “stuck.”
“You have this swath of the workforce that is upset or resentful of their current situation at work and ultimately that is a crisis of employee disengagement,” Zhao added.