Many people are reassessing how they view their work after a year of Covid. The pandemic magnified everything we don’t like about modern work - too many hours for too little pay in the context of a loosely woven national safety net. Some people are switching jobs, others are dropping out of the workforce entirely.

The reasons why people are leaving work vary, but it gets to a bigger societal question that asks what kind of work we value and how that value is rewarded. Jobs no longer provide the economic security, pension and room for advancement that helped build the middle class after World War II. And we all learned this past year that the workers who were "essential" during the pandemic have historically been undervalued.  

Today, are we getting what we need from work?

GUESTS:

• Katie Heaney is a senior writer at "The Cut" and the author of several books including the her YA novels Girl Crushed and the forthcoming The Year I Stopped Trying 
• Erin Cech is an assistant professor of Sociology and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. Her new book, The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality will be published in October.