Why these 6 Bay Area residents joined The Great Resignation

“Many employees had itchy feet,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford. “They wanted to move but were waiting for the right time when the economy had recovered. Secondly wages are rising fast so there are lots of tempting well-paid jobs out there. Finally, working from home and the pandemic have really impacted a lot of jobs and employees so there has been a great reshuffle going on.”

The phenomenon underscores ongoing job issues, said Kathyrn Edwards, a labor economist at the Rand Corp. nonprofit nonpartisan public interest think tank.

“There is a lot of evidence of growing dissatisfaction with many aspects of work in the labor market,” she said. “Missing workers are one.”

Here are the stories of six Bay Area folks who left their jobs during the pandemic.

La Kesha Wash: Following a dream deferred

La Kesha Wash, 49, always was drawn to interior design but knew it wasn’t practical while raising two children. So she worked for years in customer service, first for San Francisco parking, then for Alameda’s city utility company. They were secure jobs, but she didn’t feel passionate about them.

The pandemic gave her the push she needed to start her own business, she said. It made her realize that anything could happen anytime and so she should pursue her true passion full time. She’d already been dabbling in it by selling gift baskets, working with a business coach and taking classes with Accion Opportunity Fund, which helps small businesses with access to capital, networks and coaching.

“I’m very spiritual, so I just sat, prayed on it, was quiet and meditated until I got a positive answer,” she said.

She quit her job in July and launched Meticulous Design, a full-service interior design boutique, largely for residences. For clients on a budget, she can do work herself, such as refinishing countertops. She also sells decor items on Facebook Marketplace, including furniture she refinishes, candles and throw pillows.

Starting with mainly friends and family, the initial cash flow wasn’t quite enough, so she cashed out a retirement account to prepay rent on her Alameda apartment and other ongoing expenses.

Health insurance was a big stumbling block but she found a good plan through Covered California. It also helped that her kids, now 32 and 21, are on their own.

In February she will add a line of unique chairs. She licensed archival photos of Billie Holiday, Dorothy Dandridge, Nina Simone and Lena Horne, and had them printed on fabric. She buys antique chairs and reupholsters them with the special fabric. “I’m hoping I get so many chair orders that I have to mass produce,” she said with a laugh.

“I needed this,” she said. “I needed to step back and do something else so I could remain my nice bubbly self.”

Sofia Geoghegan: Seeking work-life balance

Sofia Geoghegan, 39, of San Leandro was climbing her way through the ranks as an accountant at a Big 4 Firm.

“After the pandemic hit, our kids were at home and it became a struggle between I wasn’t a good enough employee and I wasn’t a good enough mom,” she said. “You start to reevaluate what’s important.”

She and her husband Matthew realized it made sense for her to stop full-time work, which she did in June 2020.

“At least one of us could pour their heart into their job and the other could handle the home life,” she said. At that point she had two toddlers, now aged 4 and almost 3; now she has a 2-month-old baby as well.

Going to one income meant trimming expenses. But that was easier with her at home because they’d spent a lot of money on prepared meals, since neither had time to cook.

Geoghegan started finding freelance accounting work through her network and realized that fit much better for her life. Now she works about 15 to 20 hours a week, making about 40% of her previous salary, and giving her more mental space for the family. She acknowledges how lucky she is that her husband, also an accountant, had a stable job with health insurance, giving her the freedom to quit.

“There wasn’t enough of me to go around,” she said. “I just felt like my tank was empty. I was always so frazzled.

“So now I’m self-employed, doing what I want and redefining what success means to me. It used to mean a big corporate job with big corporate pay and big title, working my bones off. Now success to me is having control of my life and my schedule irrespective of pay.”

Jim Himelic: Realizing that working from home works

Jim Himelic, 37, of Capitola, had toyed with starting his own energy consulting firm but felt that he needed the structure of a conventional workplace. Working from home never appealed to him.

“I always thought I was the type of person who needed to go to a physical office with co-workers to feel like I’m part of something and to keep me focused,” he said.

But like millions of others, he had to switch to remote work during the pandemic. He had just started a new job managing energy risk and analytics with a local energy utility, after a career doing similar work at PG&E and other energy firms.

“I was at a point in my career where I saw a greater opportunity working for myself and trying to build a business rather than continuing to work for a traditional employer,” he said.

The stay-at-home orders showed him that he could take the plunge.

“During the pandemic I was much more productive than I originally thought I would be,” he said. “That risk of not being able to buckle down never materialized, so it gave me confidence that as a one-person shop I’d still be able to be disciplined.”

He left his job this summer to start First Principles Advisory, writing software models for energy companies to simulate the electricity grid’s changes over time.

Himelic is happy to feel he’s able to be more nimble than a hidebound corporate bureaucracy.

“I was at a point in my career where I saw a greater opportunity in working for myself and trying to build a business rather than continuing to work for a traditional employer,” he said. “The pandemic accelerated that.”

Hillary Brooks: Supporting her daughter’s education

Parents everywhere had to struggle to supervise their children’s remote learning during the pandemic.

But Hillary Brooks, “a single mother by choice,” had to keep doing it this school year. Her daughter, Willa, 13, wanted to do independent study and Berkeley schools require parents to be involved for 20 hours a week. Coping with anxiety and other disorders, Willa found the pandemic traumatizing and the masking requirements at school onerous.

Brooks quit her associate director job at a social-justice nonprofit to deal with all the technicalities of helping her eighth-grader navigate the new system, seek out the best high school for her for next year, and deal with her own immunosuppression issues.

“I have some health challenges, but they don’t rise to the point of disability coverage, and I was having to take vacation days to cover sick time,” she said. “It all became too much.”

She hopes to start doing consulting in January.

“I think the pandemic has exposed so many things we already knew were wrong with society anyway,” she said. “It just kind of all came home.”

Shafia Nisa: Pursuing a passion for wildlife

In the fourth grade, Shafia Nisa learned about wildlife going extinct in the Amazon rain forest.

“I remember telling myself, even as a little girl, that one day I’d do something about it,” said Nisa, 31.

Instead, she got a degree in health education and did nonprofit work for several years, then became a cannabis delivery driver at the pandemic’s outset.

A year ago, she was rear-ended while making a delivery. The staffing agency that hired her, which did not carry workers’ compensation insurance, let her go. She got a lawyer and eventually received a settlement for her personal injury and damage to her car.

She used that as seed money to start her own business (as well as getting her car fixed). She took weeks of online classes at the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center to prepare.

In June she decided to launch an eco-friendly greeting cards business with bird themes that would also raise awareness about parrot conservation.

She’d grown up with with chickens and parakeets, and has a close relationship with Milo, her pineapple green cheek conure, who flaunts feathers in orange, yellow, blue and green. “He’s very sassy and wants things his way, when he wants it,” she said.

Her cards and envelopes are made from hemp and recycled paper. Her packaging is plastic made from plants. Her sticker labels are made from sugar cane.

The company, named Hakuna Matata Vibes in celebration of Milo’s spirit, is already getting traction, with placement in some local shops, an Etsy store and approval for free rent to take over an old newspaper kiosk in downtown San Francisco to sell its wares. The kiosk program is a joint venture between the San Francisco Arts Commission and JCDecaux, which owns the kiosks.

While the car accident was one catalyst for her entrepreneurship, the pandemic was even more important in giving her perspective. After seeing seeing relatives suffer from COVID-19 and a friend die, she realized. “I really need to figure out what I actually want to be doing, what I’m passionate about and stop wasting my time doing things I’m not 100% about.”

“I don’t think of this as work,” she said about her new enterprise.

Ly Nguyen: From corporate spouse to house spouse

Richmond resident Ly Nguyen, 46, spent the past five years working 10 to 12 hours a day in crisis communications and corporate communications.

“I was pretty tired,” she said. “At some point my body started to feel the stress and anxiety. Sometimes I would end my days with my body trembling because I was pushing myself so hard.”

Her mom was undergoing cancer treatments and her kids, now 9 and 13, were doing distance learning last year, struggling to figure out Microsoft Teams.

This summer she quit her job.

A writer at heart, she’s been writing about the transition from corporate spouse to “house spouse.”

“I had no idea there were a lot of people doing this,” she said. “But after I quit, I started reading about the Great Resignation.”

Nguyen initially struggled with guilt that she’s not making enough money. She and a friend in a similar situation are supporting each other. She’s working on a book and doing some consulting.

“I had been working so much … to finally pause and decompress made a huge difference,” she said.

She’s been thinking about her values and how she wants to handle her work-life balance.

“I know I don’t want to go back to the level of intensity I was working at,” she said. “I definitely want to make sure I have time to be with my kids. It goes by so fast, and the next few years are so key. Now I get to walk my daughter to school and pick her up from school, which I haven’t done in many years.”

Whatever her next chapter holds, she knows it will be different — and she thinks the changes will ripple throughout industries.

“It’s almost like a human movement,” she said about the Great Resignation. “For a lot of us it is scary for many reasons. At some point in your life, you realize, ‘I have to really take care of myself and my family.’ It’s neat to see that so many of us have done that. Something’s got to change. This will push companies to do things differently.”