I suspect that the so-called Great Resignation follows a period of nobody leaving their jobs, presumably due to fear of what was to come amid the pandemic. Last year reports were indicating that a record number of people wanted to leave their jobs, but weren’t, thus giving us a glut of people ready to leave all at once instead of doing so over a longer period of time like they normally would. This would also explain the so-called Labour Shortage we were hearing about. With people not looking to job hop, people applying for work dried up, leaving a liquidity problem. In normal times employers always have someone ready to leave their current position in which to hire.
Labor shortages are also a problem of workforce participation. While the big headline number that most news organizations cover is unemployment numbers, the one that is really important with the pandemic is Workforce Participation. AKA: "the proportion of the working-age population that is either working or actively looking for work". Check out the stats for this: [0]. We are still down 1.5% from where we were pre-pandemic (63.4 - 61.9). With the workforce age population being around 204 million people, that means that we are down about 3 million people.
I live in Iowa and we were at full employment pre-pandemic. Everybody who wanted a job had one, and businesses all over the state were short of staff just like they are today. Politicians were speculating on ways to get disabled people and stay-at-home-moms into the workforce, overlooking our chronic brain drain of people going to out-of-state universities and never coming back. Our return to normal was always going to be that, but everyone seems to have forgotten.
Here's an article from 2019 about it, but the situation is just no longer in the conversation because unemployment benefits (which ended ages ago) is an easier target than making it suck less to live here: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/23/721086615/in-this-town-you-ap...
The vast majority of the drop in Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is Boomers permanently withdrawing from the workforce (some of which may have been accelerated by the pandemic, both because of convincing people they didn't want to keep working and disability, but while there may be some temporary unretirement driven by improved working conditions and rising costs & pay, most of that won't reverse.)
The “working age” band has a lower end, but no upper end, so demographic bulges passing through retirement age produce LFPR drops.
