Employers in America say they have had enough. Across the economy, they report, businesses and the public are suffering from curtailed services, longer waits, and operations closed by staff absences. But those industries where employers are struggling the most to recruit and retain labor all share something in common: they are industries where, long before the pandemic, workers complained about the dehumanizing routine and disempowered status imposed on them by managers, owners, and public officials.

Total employment in the American economy today has nearly returned to its peak in February 2020. So too has the civilian labor force level, the number of people who worked in a given week or looked for work in the prior month, returned to its pre-pandemic level.

Yet the composition of employment in the American economy has been profoundly shaped by the pandemic. Not only have the shifts in consumer spending patterns altered employers’ demand for labor, expanding employment in truck and air transportation, warehousing and storage, and all manner of office administration from telemarketing to HR. But the supply of labor to the sectors of the economy has also been fundamentally altered by something more than pandemic consumption habits: workers’ new mood conditioned by the calamity.