Op-Ed: Quiet Quitting
By Ailin Goode
Note to readers:
As you read articles about Quiet Quitting and American labor in general, yes including ours, I want you to pay attention to how the pieces are framed. What angle are they writing from? What is the tone? Fear, warning, praising, or neutral etc. While you read, think about what each publication might gain from framing it that way. This is a beneficial practice for most topics you’re reading about.
Looking at material this way doesn’t mean you think it's inherently untrustworthy or intentionally manipulative. It just helps you get a broader perspective on what you’re reading.
Quiet quitting. It started on TikTok and now it seems like every business blogger, news outlet, and publication has something to say about. So, of course, we should chime in.
Quiet quitting lacks a singular definition since it manifests differently depending on who is doing it and the environment they’re doing it in. Quiet quitting is also referred to as “acting your wage.” It means doing the job you are getting paid to do. No more, no less. It is the practice of setting boundaries in the workplace and separating personal identity from worker productivity.
While the term quiet quitting and the nuance it holds is new, the action itself is not. It’s a revision of a power tool used by the labor movement called “work-to-rule.” Work-to-rule is defined as, “a form of protest in which employees do exactly what is stated in their contracts, and nothing more, in order to slow down production.” It has traditionally been used to protest exploitive and harmful workplace practices like uncompensated labor and unsafe working conditions.
Where work-to-rule is used intentionally to slow down production, quiet quitting focusing on bringing the personal productivity of the worker practicing it down to a slower, healthier pace. It has less to do with trying to cause friction in the workplace and more to do with self-care.
Quiet quitting has been described as a “response to burnout and hustle culture.” I see it as the most recent continuation of a workers’ movement whose members have been forced to find ways to respond to and mitigate the harmful treatment from their employers for hundreds of years.
News outlets are calling quiet quitting a “crisis,” a “symptom of poor management,” and a “new term for an old concept: employee disengagement.” There is a multitude of discourse around how accurate the term is, what businesses can do to prevent burnout, and make workplaces more hospitable. In other words, the conversation is centered around the business-employee relationship.
To me, this misses the point. The “Great Resignation,” unprecedented Union involvement and support, millions of people discussing their identities in the American workplace…we are seeing a massive shift in how Americans feel about what we’ve been taught about how our labor works and what it means.
Is it a coincidence that the most diverse and well-educated generations in the history of the country are responsible for this current wave? A business learning how to manage its employees' feelings of burnout assumes that those feelings are coming from the company and not from the aggressive awareness we all have of the increasing inability to live and thrive in the United States.
A mismanaged global pandemic where business owners proved countless times they were more concerned with their profits than the health, safety, and wellbeing of their employees. The climate crisis. The knowledge that the exploitation of labor has been fundamental to building and maintaining a country whose ruling class systematically and consistently wages war on the human rights of its citizens as well as the rights of those abroad.
Of course we are reconsidering what it means to be a worker in America. Time off, mental health days, and worker appreciation can’t replace the overwhelming feeling that the system we are working within doesn’t actually care about us at all. And I say this as someone who is currently in a job where I feel valued and my time, work, and boundaries are respected.
The focus shouldn’t be on why workers are quiet quitting. It should be on larger issues, like why so many businesses would fail without uncompensated or undercompensated labor. Or how “hard working” became a moral value and working yourself to death a marker of pride. Or why so many people are forced to work themselves to death to begin with.
Workers’ rights movements don’t spring out of nowhere. Quiet quitting isn’t brand new, nor is it a symptom exclusively of recent events. It is a continued response to a system designed to hold space for business owners to push their employees as far as they can. The system has shifted time and again from slavery, to child labor, to immigrant exploitation, to prison labor, to labor overseas, to wage slavery. The worker response will continue to shift with it.
Quiet quitting is a sign of the times. The demand from our employers is the same one we are making from our government. We are people, not products. We are human beings with rights, identities, and lives. We demand to be treated with dignity, respect, and care, as all humans deserve.
References:
Boundary Setting – Nedra Tawwab
The Labor Movement – AFL-CIO, American Labor Studies Center, US Department of Labor
Get tickets to join the conversation at Round Table Talk: Quiet Quitting, a hybrid Audacity event, Saturday September 10th, 12pm - 2pm.
Meet the Writer
Ailin Goode is a journalist turned poet with over a decade of writing experience across multiple fields. They have acted as the lead journalist for an independent music magazine, the managing editor of a child health and safety website, and as a foreign policy analyst for an independent news site. When they are not writing, you can find them playing with their dog, modeling, studying, or hanging out with their friends.
