9: Conclusion: Fed-up While Locked Down

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an upheaval in global labor markets. In the United States, the unemployment rate hovered below 4% throughout 2022. This followed a pandemic high unemployment rate of nearly 16% in May 2020.¹ The stark change could be described by a number of factors in the United States: over 1 million deaths, an increase in retirements, people leaving the workforce for health reasons, and general shuffling of industries as workers decided employers treated them inadequately during a pandemic. Since college-educated millennials came of working age around the time of the Great Recession, the pandemic job upheaval created the first opportunity for many younger workers to find a job that matched their skills. However, low unemployment runs counter to the needs of digital feudalism and we see capitalism attempting to fight back.