Economists report that workers are starting to act like millennials on Tinder: They’re ditching jobs without so much as an email.
“A number of contacts said that they had been ‘ghosted,’ a situation in which a worker stops coming to work without notice and then is impossible to contact,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago notes in December’s Beige Book, which tracks employment trends.
National data on economic “ghosting” is lacking, The term, which usually applies to dating, first surfaced in 2016 on Dictionary.com. But, as The Washington Post reports companies across the country say silent exits are on the rise.
Analysts blame America’s increasingly tight labor market. Job openings have surpassed the number of seekers for eight straight months, and the unemployment rate has clung to a 49-year low of 3.7% since September.
Janitors, baristas, welders, accountants, engineers—they’re all in demand, said Michael Hicks, a labor economist at Ball State University in Indiana. More people may opt to skip tough conversations and slide right into the next thing.
