The State Where People Are Leaving Their Jobs

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 4, 8:30AM EDT

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The State Where People Are Leaving Their Jobs — © krblokhin / iStock via Getty Images

For several months, the two most prominent news headlines about jobs were the decline in unemployment and how hard it has been for companies to find workers at reasonable compensation rates. People could quit their jobs and find better ones elsewhere. People resigned at the highest pace in Georgia, and states in the South had the fastest pace in general.
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The unemployment rate has changed radically over the past three years. From 2019 through early 2020, the jobless rate was under 4%. By February 2020, it had dropped near a historic low of 3.5%. The COVID-19 pandemic made the rate soar to 14.7% in April, the highest rate since the Great Depression. It took until recently to regain the 20.5 million jobs lost because of the virus.
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Unemployment rates have been very different from state to state, as has always been the case. In August, the national jobless rate was 3.7%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was below 3% in Florida (2.7%), Georgia (2.8%) and Alabama (2.6%).
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WalletHub reviewed resignation rates in August. Its States With the Highest Job Resignation Rates report pointed out that “As the economy has started to recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a surge in job openings, with some employers having a difficult time filling all their open positions.”
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The resignation rate in Georgia in August was 4.8%. Kentucky followed with 4.4% and Tennessee at 4.3%. There is no explanation for the cluster. Neither is there one for the states where the rates were lowest: New York (1.9%), District of Columbia (2.3%) and New Jersey and Pennsylvania (2.6% each).

A look at the past 12 months based on the same measurements shows that these states were near the top and the bottom of the resignation list.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.