Exhausted frontline workers switch industries due to harassment

• Workers change industries to escape abuse, burnout and harassment.
• Experts attributed the industry changes to the lack of well-paid, harassment-free hourly concerts.
• Workers said they recognize that every job has its challenges, but choose those that are beneficial to their mental health.

Former flight attendant Jada Magwood recalled that passengers verbally assaulted her on multiple occasions during the COVID-19 pandemic – including when a police officer had to escort a drunk and violent traveler out of his plane.

Magwood recently left the travel industry for a job at a tech startup. She had no intention of quitting smoking, but burnout from passenger violence prompted her to seek jobs without much interaction with customers.

Flight attendants, like retail workers and nurses, have experienced unruly and sometimes violent behavior from customers over the past year. Some Americans are aggressively opposing mask warrants, while others may come out against it because of the trauma of the pandemic, experts and workers have said.

Workers in general abandon their usual sector in search of greener pastures. An April 2021 Prudential survey found that one in five respondents changed jobs during the pandemic, while 26% said they plan to look for a new job after the coronavirus threat subsides.

The abuse “has increased the feeling of being disposable for our airlines during the pandemic,” Magwood said. “In the end, I got to a point where I wasn’t paid enough to cope with such situations.”

Southwest Airlines

In search of the lesser evil

After months of dealing with abuse, many frontline workers are desperate to find different jobs with new issues they are not used to facing, gigs that represent the lesser evil. This means that the besieged restaurant staff want to work in warehouses. Tired warehouse workers are desperate to get into retail. Exhausted retail workers are considering returning to nursing school. Etc.

Magwood said she recognizes that working at a tech startup won’t be easy, given the industry’s high rates of burnout and the sometimes long working hours. But his company offers mental health days and the ability to work from home on a permanent basis, two welcome changes after months of dealing with unruly air travelers.

“As a flight attendant you don’t have the luxury of being able to take 10 minutes to yourself unless you want to stand in the toilet for those 10 minutes,” she said. .

Like Magwood, Jessica Walsh spent much of the pandemic dealing with what she called “snippy” customers, angry in her job in the paint department of a Menard’s craft store in the Midwest. .

Walsh said she regularly had to choose between asking sometimes violent customers to put on their masks or letting the buyer potentially expose them to COVID-19. Finally, she left for a receptionist concert. Walsh said she appreciated the scarcity of her face-to-face interactions with clients at her new job.

“A lot of people seem to have found other work or expressed their entry into different industries; I have a few friends who have gone back to school,” Walsh told Insider. “The idea seems to be, ‘Get away from retail.’ “

Callaghan O’Hare for Insider

Workers and employers cross industry boundaries to find new opportunities

It’s not just the employees. The ongoing labor shortage has even prompted a few employers to reach out to all industries in order to attract new candidates. Some short-staffed supply chain companies specifically target employees in quick-service restaurants.

“We found that these types of workers made a good transition to warehouse work. They are very hard workers and used to hourly work,” Maggie Barnett, COO of logistics provider ShipHero told Insider. .

But the current exodus is likely to hurt some sectors more than others. Dr. PK Kannan, Dean’s Chair in Marketing Science at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, told Insider that restaurant workers in particular “have found other options. “after the restaurants close.

But the tough hiring environment could also prove to be an opportunity for blue collar workers looking to make a big change.

“If you’ve ever had a dream company you wanted to work for, then now is the time to go,” Mathieu Stevenson, CEO of online hourly labor marketplace Snagajob, told Insider. “Some hourly employers we work with basically say, ‘We will interview anyone willing to work with us as long as they meet the minimum criteria. “”