CSNA news

CSNA Stockbook 2022 to arrive with you shortly

The CSNA Stockbook arrives in stores during the week beginning 20 December.

The CSNA Stockbook is designed to review and track the sales of your newspapers and magazines. The 2022 CSNA Stockbook includes tips on managing your newspapers and magazines, a list of top-selling magazines, CSNA deals, CSNA store signage, insurance tips, CSNA training video information and so much more. This is an invaluable resource for your newspaper and magazine department!

If you do not receive your Stockbook by 23 December, please contact Laura in the office on 045-535050 to arrange for your copy to be delivered.

The CSNA Stockbook 2022 is an invaluable resource for your newspaper and magazine department

Public holiday pay: Christmas 2021

This year Christmas falls on a Saturday and St. Stephens day is on a Sunday. If a public holiday falls on a weekend, employees do not have any automatic legal entitlement to have the next working day off work. When this happens, some employers might treat the following Monday as a public holiday but an employer can require employees to attend work on that day.

If a public holiday falls on a day that is not a normal working day for a business (for example, on Saturday or Sunday), employees are still entitled to the benefit for that public holiday.

When this happens, employees are entitled to one of the following: • A paid day off within a month of the public holiday • An additional day of annual leave • An additional day’s pay

Which benefit is given is at the discretion of the employer. n

Christmas Day falls on a Saturday this year

CSNA CONTACT DETAILS

If you have any queries regarding CSNA services or membership please contact the office in Naas, Co. Kildare on 045-535050 or by email to info@csna.ie/www.csna.ie

HEALTHY SWAPS!

BARRY WHELAN

managing director of Excel Recruitment

www.excelrecruitment.com

‘ T h e G r e a t R e s i g n a t i o n ’ m i s s e s t h e p o i n t

The phrase, ‘The Great Resignation’, has become synonymous with describing record levels of job turnover. However, according to Excel Recruitment’s Barry Whelan, it overlooks the bigger story which is a fundamental rethinking of our relationship to work and our priorities in life

During an interview with Bloomberg in May 2021, Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, spoke about a possible spike in job turnover. He called this ‘The Great Resignation’. Several weeks later his forewarning was confirmed, with a record 4 million Americans leaving their jobs that April. This mass exodus became a global trend, Klotz’s terminology fit the bill perfectly and a phrase was coined.

Staff crisis

The dog on the street knows that the Irish economy is in the grip of a ‘staff crisis’ with employees leaving their jobs in unprecedented numbers, changing employers, or taking time away from the workforce entirely. Anyone can see the unprecedented demand for workers, whether it is the amount of job creation announcements or a simple walk down a main street, with signs in the windows of most hospitality outlets and retail stores. Many people have stepped away from difficult frontline jobs made even harder by the pandemic, while others are forgoing opportunities for money and status in exchange for greater flexibility or work-life balance and many employees have simply left the workforce altogether, hence the phrase we have now started seeing; The Great Resignation.

Missing the bigger picture

Why are people leaving their jobs in the first place? Rampant stress? A forced self-reflection on what really matters considering the pandemic? The shift to work remotely and a disconnect from their companies? The Great Resignation centres around the language of job status, but arguably misses the bigger picture: a radical realignment of values that is driving people to reassess their relationship to life at home, with family, with friends and their lives beyond the workforce. In many ways, this is a mental health conversation. Burnout is now more widely acknowledged; workers also feel a sense of belonging in the workplace. For some employees, this is an opportunity to question what their workplace requires of them to do their jobs.

Perhaps, even more broadly, now is the time to call into question the overall current situation in the workplace. How does work bring meaning to our lives? How can we build a different relationship to it? These questions transcend just the workplace and responding to them means we would have to expand

The Great Resignation is a useful phrase to describe the rise in people quitting their jobs, but it doesn’t capture the full reality of what’s happening in today’s jobs market, writes Barry Whelan

the conversation to include friends, family, personal development, etc, but in referring to this era as The Great Resignation, we are collectively reducing the importance of the issues that matter most.

Examining work evolution

The Great Resignation is a concise phrase that works well to name an evolving era around people quitting their jobs, but it’s important that we do not stop here in thinking about how to conceive of this period. We should question other ways of characterising this movement, according to the people that have found themselves in it and the topics at the core of their shifts. For example, terms like The Great Reshuffle, focus on what happens after someone has resigned, specifically the mobility of transitioning to new work. Perhaps this is not the Great Resignation or indeed the Great Retirement, but it is actually the Great Reprioritization due to the shift in values that occurs as workers weigh up what is important to them. As journalist Kathryn Hymes recently wrote in a Wired article, each of these names has its own set of uses, pros and cons. But at the same time, they all attempt to seed important, deeper reflections about work that may lead to different ends.

As its primary title, the Great Resignation does not do this period justice. We need to develop a larger vocabulary for how work is evolving in light of the pandemic. Embracing an era of description, even if it isn’t tidy, is vital for us to find meaning in work while life is in upheaval. ■