Quiet quitting: why doing the bare minimum at work has gone global
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Lol - the definition for "quiet quitting" is doing your job to expectations and leaving on time.
So not overdoing your job is basically quitting in their eyes. Ridiculous.
The nerds writing these articles are doing far less than “the bare minimum at work!”
If you are doing hourly type low paid work I get it. You get what you pay for and all. But salaried workers get paid whatever they are able to negotiate. Still labor in exchange for money but only if you show results.
Another way I will put it is, business is a competition right? Each employee is a competitive advantage to their employer, any business needs a certain portion of workers to do more than bare minimum to not get fired or else it would end up providing service equivalent to that.
I am all for workers rights but this shitty attitude sucks. Just about any place I try to do business at I practically have to beg them to take my money and then smile as retail workers, customer support,etc... shit on me. Because they don't give a shit how their laziness affects others other than their employer. No pride in their work.
This is the difference between the US these days and countries where it is offensive to tip people because they take pride in their work and paying them extra to do their job is saying they are lazy and lack self-respect as a default.
Work set/scheduled hours. Don't overwork yourself but come on! Give a shit and do more than what it takes to not get fired because you take pride in what you do? Because you do it day in and out and that is what you leave behind, your story!? Because someone raised you to respect yourself and act honorably?
sigh what is the point. Might as well talk gibberish in this "us vs them" society.
If anything, I am growing less and less sympathetic to pro-labor movements because of this. The scale at which this is happening means it has no effect other than to be mean out of spite and empower laziness. I can't go to another business to encourage better pay at this one and tbh, if you mistreat me because you don't get paid enough I only want permanent unemployment for you and nothing more.
If you work for amazon and meet your minimim metrics though, power to you. I have no problem with packages being delivered late lol.
To your point of "go work in a warehouse" I mean fair, and that's why restaurants are hemorrhaging staff to the cannabis industry. But it's the customers who need the attitude adjustment. In what world do these people live where it's ok to berate, insult, sometimes assault, and otherwise demean workers? The public are pigs, and by the time you personally receive bad service from a worker they've probably been taking abuse from entitled jerks for the bulk of their shift.
But, if you take one customer's mistreatment of you on another customer that is doing their best to do right by you or you have a shitty jaded attitude work elsewhere or fix your attitude. Fake smiles and politeness if you must, that should be your default.
And they stereotype people and presume shit all the time which is very unfair. And I am supposed to feel sorry for them because other customers mistreat them? I think not, they treat others in a mean way without cause and they got what was coming to them as well.
You know in essence, this is the core principle of justice that even if a million people that fit a pattern are guilty, for the sake of the one innocent you treat them all with fairness and without prejudice.
So long as retail/service workers and peope like you continue to justify mistreating people as a default, while in principle I am very much for more pay for them (glad to pay proprtionally more as well as less profits for their employer), unions, better hours and treatment, because of the default hostility against the few that are polite and tip well I will only advocate for worse conditions. Perhaps we could shop more online and ghost kitchens delivering home can adequately replace restaurants.
The counterpoint to this is that you do not have to patronize businesses where you get bad service. You are free to patronize businesses that offer better service, or hire assistants to provide you the service. But just like you cannot afford better service, the employees you are dealing with cannot afford a better job. Maybe you and they deserve it, maybe you and they don’t.
For a long, long time, American voters have prioritized lower prices and lower taxes and an eat what you kill ethos above all else. It is no surprise that the country now reaps what it sows, and that is unless you are in the very wealthiest cohorts, you should expect decreasing quality of goods and services.
I would have to be repulsively wealthy and show it off to get good service basically.
Treat others like you want to be treated. Money is not an excuse to be lazy or mistreat others. I don't expect anyone to put up fake smiles and toletate me when I am being rude but I do expect to be treated with best effort service, respect, dignity and politeness. It shouldn't matter if I a hobo or a millionaire either.
The movement does not penalize customers in a vacuum. The “movement”, and I do not really know if it is one, is just a size-able portion of the population waking up to the fact that they should not expect to own land, find a life partner, healthcare, have children, grandchildren, etc.
In my opinion, it does not entirely justify one to half ass work, but I can see being demotivate by the odds facing them.
You completed 10% more story points than expected this sprint? Nice, here's a 10% raise, but you can only keep it if you stay at this level of output.
They literally hammer into your head for months on end that employees will do the absolute bare minimum not to get fired in every MBA program.
Ordinary pay gets ordinary effort. And businesses always want the cheapest supplier.
Yeah it’s too bad. The quality of service has totally gone to shit in this country. But God forbid you complain, then you’re a Karen. People are “nice” these days, but they forgot how to be good. A nice person is trying to avoid conflict all the time. A good person is willing to enforce society’s standards in their interactions with other people.
For decades, employers have been intentionally scheduling employees erratically so that they have less opportunity to find better options and running bare bones staff with no redundancy while forcing employees to be on call.
Employers were able to do this due to the vast amounts of supply of labor relative to demand in conjunction with lack of taxpayer funded safety net and lack of minimum quality of life at work labor laws.
It is reasonable to expect society, after decades, to learn from this and begin playing by the rules that society has been propagating, which is that you look out for yourself first, and if you can climb to the top while stepping on others, it will have no negative effect on you.
> This is the difference between the US these days and countries where it is offensive to tip people because they take pride in their work and paying them extra to do their job is saying they are lazy and lack self-respect as a default.
I agree, but it is an unfortunate consequence of the breakdown of trust between one another. However, I find it hard to blame workers, when it is at the end of the day, voters and the people influencing voters to vote against things like sick/vacation leave, parental leave, minimum salaries that pay more than minimum wage, removing tipped minimum wages, daily overtime laws, etc.
If the employer wants to increase the expectations levelled on employees, then they should write it into their contracts. No contract? No expectations.
You can't hold people to some abstract set of expectations that are never written down anywhere; and if you try - well that's why they have to invent a stupid term like 'quiet quitting'.
Sitting at a desk for decades, regardless of what you’re sticking into the digital box, sounds like hell.
If people's views have changed, they are not reflective in the ever so slight drop in these values.
It's also probably worth mentioning that the range of those values is likely less than 10, in that the answer is never going to be greater than 9 or less than 2. That should make any movement have more significance.
Now more than ever, we as humans need to find a way engage and unite. But instead we are seeing more apathy, what feels like more division, and less interest in tackling truly difficult problems. Again, not trying to pin it on why (unchecked capitalism, etc), just trying to say that the state of affairs does not seem encouraging.
And those are the lucky ones.
The rest get paid meagerly while inflation and rent gobbles up any earnings they have so they work numerous jobs to scrape by.
Most of the country lives paycheck to paycheck.
I love your idealism but I think most people would be happy to see everything collapse at this point.
Hmmmmmmm
> From my experience the best minds tend to work on important problems
My experience is that you're incorrect.
What I see is tons of people living the same template: pick secure, well paid job, no matter how meaningless. Even when they take a risk to spin some startup, very often goal is to sell off and retire, with little interest in what they actually do.
Then these people get depressed and complain how life is bleak, capitalism cruel and everything should collapse.
Personal experiences is anecdotal. There's hard stat's that say that a majority of this country does not live like you do.
Btw I'm not from USA and reading HN recently, I'm kinda happy about it, because it seems only options on your side are: starving, prisoner of job, sell-off with guilt trips/existential crisis, demoralized billionaire. Is there anyone left in the US, who simply enjoys life as it is?
I obviously dramatize here a bit, but literally a few comments earlier someone wrote to me, that, he/she didn't consent to be alive. Really dystopian thread.
I notice financially privileged people tend to advocate for a 'dont worry be happy' 'everythings going to be alright' mode of living life because theyre shielded from the brutality of the world by their money or their families money.
It's the same reason financially privileged people never admit that they had help from their family and always claim that they made their money themselves.
Because they're completely unaware of what it really takes to make it in life without any help from anyone and I suspect feel a little guilty how easy their life has been compared to others and want to connect with, and associate with people who actually made it on their own.
If you have ever been poor or financially struggling, you would realize 'don't worry be happy' is not a functional way of living life if you don't have family money....at least in America.
The real advice is to fight tooth and nail to try to get oneself and family to financial safety.
May I have my happiness-pass now please? :-)
> The real advice is to fight tooth and nail to try to get oneself and family to financial safety.
It is. My parents surely did and I'm also going to (btw calling this privilege and guilt tripping over fact, that somebody's parents are decent human beings is kinda weird).
This is how life works. No reason to obsess over some places being shitty. There's less of them than a few generations ago (fun fact - my city still has its old beheading stone. Thankfully not used for couple hundreds of years).
That's a rough start. Did they retire? What do they do now?
What's funny, they will tell you, that factory wasn't bad compared to work in the field they did with their own parents. It also got them place in block of flats - objectively kinda crappy, but everything was crappy back then.
What happened to them after the fall of socialism?
Nothing exciting, but they always provided for the family and helped us to start adult life however they could.
Unfortunately, it seems to be an extreme historical anomaly for elites to put the welfare of their people over the zero-sum needs of their own class. One recent such anomaly was in the middle of the 20th century--The U.S. and USSR both invested heavily in building large middle classes (it being historically rare for such to exist at all) because they wanted research supremacy, which you can't get if you squander 95% of the natural intellectual talent, during the Cold War. Also, the existence of other systems put both sides on better behavior: capitalism couldn't be as scummy as it is today, and state-run socialism had to improve material circumstances and scale back the authoritarian tendencies it had developed during WW2... because, otherwise, neither system would have survived. But now that the Cold War is over, we're stuck in this global authoritarian capitalism that retains the worst aspects of both systems.
The division we're seeing is, of course, artificial. The elites deliberately pit people against each other (and trot out old divisive garbage: zero-sum nationalism, weird-ass conspiracy theories to distract from the more boring and often technically legal conspiracies occurring in plain sight, and of course antisemitism) because otherwise, the natural lay of the land would have 95+ percent of the people guillotining their dusty asses. That being said, I can't think of an easy way to end it. We do, as humans, need to (using your words) engage and unite; the problem is that what we need to unite to do--that is, overthrow the current global corporate elite using any means and mechanisms that shall work--is extremely socially unacceptable because those in charge have made it so. Thus, we're just expected to accept a declining standard of living and a nearly complete halt on technical progress at a time when we need it the most.
History shows revolution almost always ends in civil war and destroyed infrastructure. You can't just create a power vacuum with nothing to fill it.
Even if you do manage revolution on a unified front, it always seems to splinter within a generation unless something radically new from some outside source forces you to alter or die.
The best revolutions start with an abdication and reform, reform, reform.
The only way i see that happeniing in the US is if everyone started voting third party and stopped being a two party system. That would create some competiton among the ruling elite.
The problems actually originate from the way we engage in peaceful transactions and activities among each other. It is pretty much universally agreed by economists that something akin to a land value tax is suitable for the efficient allocation of land. This should be used as an opportunity to give everyone an equal share of land on the planet. By that I mean parts of the revenue of a land value tax would be paid out as a citizen's dividend, it is almost as if you were receiving a land certificate but was automatically renting it out for money. You can then use that money to rent your own land.
This would fix the "rent is too damn high" problem. The money problem mostly fixed itself in its own but anyone who would advocate for e.g. a demurrage currency could introduce it as an equivalent to food stamps, not necessarily for the entire population.
I like to think about how much time/effort/energy has been put into designing and indoctrinating people into systems so that that the 95% or so will actually do the work to defend its existence and the elite class can operate effectively as managers rather than ever get their hands dirty. How easy and self-reinforcing it is for people to operate against their own interests is the product of millenia of heavy research into information control, psychology, and power, not an emergent property of social people
People complaint but I argued he was the best employee we had thus far. "If we can find just a few of these guys I too can stay home whenever I feel like it! We just need 3 or 4 of these guys to do what use to be a one man job. Then it will actually get done in stead of you guys wasting precious time talking about how bad he is, wanting him gone. Gone where? To sit at home and live of our tax money? Well, I for one love paying for it. He should sit at home until you guys wake up to the new reality!
Those unmotivated milenimals apparently are the answer. Waving a moldy dried out carrot in front of their nose has no effect.
Its not a real solution of course... at least I think not? Not sure really. But things will change regardless. It might not be pretty, it will at least be interesting times.
Just look around you, the interests of the savers override those who are still working for their own wealth. Housing and money are supposed to be appreciating investments instead of shelter for people and a medium of exchange for workers.
As people get wealthier, they want their wealth to be in forms that are harmful to the rest of society that isn't as wealthy.
Thankfully I did it within my first few years in the workforce, I worked my butt off for a project, got a lot of praise but a disappointing bonus, calculated my overall rate per hour and realized I was being stooged.
In the following year my first performance review was bad, I just presented the numbers and my manager was pretty much unable to counter my argument other than risking my scope for promotions.
I just flat out stated I've proven I can work hard, promote me first, then I go back to that output.
TLDR; people now see through corporate bullshit, fuck you pay me.
IME, they generally stick to the original plan of not promoting people.
The comp was ok and I had good work life balance so I stuck around.