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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

On one side, you have people doing what they're paid to do. On the other you have people creatively firing them, an illegal practice in some countries.

I really don't get why quiet quitting is even a term. It's just people not exceeding expectations as a default.

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> I really don't get why quiet quitting is even a term.

“Quiet quitting” is a labor-hostile way of describing what labor advocates call “work to rule”.

“Quiet quitting” has different connotations than “work to rule” which give the managerial class a handle to oppose the leverage knowledge workers gained during the pandemic vis-a-vis remote work.

Workers should counter the term “quiet quitting” with what it really is, “work to rule”.

Except labor was the group that came up with the term "quiet quitting."

Also, I'd say "work to rule" is also pretty bad from a branding/comprehension perspective, given the multiple meanings of the word rule. I suppose it's meant to mean "do the exact work required by the rules governing your job and no more" but grammatically the sentence reads as though it's referring to the verb form of the word - i.e. "work in order to become a ruler within the organization."

> I suppose it's meant to mean "do the exact work required by the rules governing your job and no more" but grammatically the sentence reads as though it's referring to the verb form of the word - i.e. "work in order to become a ruler within the organization."

“Work to rule” is an elision, short for “work according to rule”.

Right, so sounds like I understood the meaning there. The point still stands, though - it's a grammatically ambiguous phrase, which is a bad quality when you're looking for a shorthand way to communicate an idea.

Don't think grammatical ambiguity in the names of labor tactics is a significant bottleneck here.

Yeah, for me it was more like working maybe 2 hours a day and then sneaking out early to catch a movie. Moviepass and "quiet quitting" or whatever you want to call it were a match that made for a beautiful summer in 2018.

> Yeah, for me it was more like working maybe 2 hours a day and then sneaking out early to catch a movie. Moviepass and "quiet quitting" or whatever you want to call it were a match that made for a beautiful summer in 2018.

That’s not “work to rule”. That’s straight up dereliction of duty.

If you're not paid by the hour and not required to be on call (which seems to be the above case), the it's very hard for an employer to argue that you need to be at home, staring at a monitor just in case.

You may feel an urge to behave that way.

Or perhaps quiet quitting? It was quiet enough that no one noticed - and this was not a WFH position. Eventually I got laid off (loudly) if that helps. Lay off had nothing to do with my personal performance (at that point it was covid lockdown and we were completely WFH so I generally spent more hours online anyway), but the business just wasn't doing good, hence all the downtime in the previous years.

Branding matters, and work to rule and quiet quitting project different brands to my ear.

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