Right, but that instant drop was lockdowns. Basically the whole nation went into lockdown, then partially re-opened. Now you have a partial lockdown situation. E.g. restaurants limited to X people, etc.

If she had written a piece that said "the labor force may not recover from the lockdowns", then she could gather this piece of data and other pieces of data and make a case. But that's not the Great Resignation thesis.

FYI, I am not saying that we should not have good labor reporting -- now is one of the rare times when labor reporting is actually interesting. But not this Time piece. I could spend 10 minutes googling and come up with a more interesting, more fact base piece of journalism.

One could interpret the phrase of great resignation a little more loosely, not as one of people leaving their jobs, but not returning as fast as what is obviously expected. But I agree that the data backed research is lacking in this article. With a little more time they could have done an age breakdown of the participation rate and have a much more interesting article with stronger conclusions.

I don’t think there’s any place in the US that has any sort of lockdown.

I think that’s been the case for many months now.