Burned out frontline workers are seeking out the lesser evil in their job searches
Sun, October 10, 2021, 8:05 AM
Many workers are desperate for new lesser evil jobs.
Former flight attendant Jada Magwood recalled passengers verbally assaulting her on multiple occasions during the COVID-19 pandemic - including when a police officer had to escort an intoxicated, violent traveler off her plane.
Magwood recently left the travel industry for a job at a tech startup. She didn't plan on quitting, but the burnout from passenger violence prompted her to seek out jobs without much customer-facing interaction.
The abuse "heightened the feeling of being disposable to our airlines during the pandemic," Magwood said. "At the end of the day, I got to a point where I was not getting paid enough to deal with situations like that."
Flight attendants are quitting for jobs in different industries due to the uptick in unruly passengers. Southwest Airlines
Like Magwood, Jessica Walsh spent much of the pandemic dealing with what she called "snippy," short-tempered customers 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 their mask on or letting the shopper potentially expose her to COVID-19. Eventually, she left for a receptionist gig. Walsh said she appreciated how seldom she interacted with clients face-to-face at her new job.
After months of coping with the abuse, many frontline workers are desperate to find different jobs with new problems that they're not used to dealing with, gigs that represent the lesser evil. That means beleaguered restaurant staff want to work at warehouses. Tired warehouse workers are desperate to get into retail. Exhausted retail workers are pondering going back to nursing school. And so on.
People at a local taco joint are all masked whereas people at the local high end steakhouse are overwhelmingly not.
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