Comment by soganess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soganess | Hacker News Reader

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Every time a QQ article shows up on HN the conversation circles around the phrase itself. Questions/statements like "How is doing your job quitting?" and "This is just some nonsense the media cooked up to scare people."

I'm not trying to detract from that, but I'd really like to ask about the "Why"; why is this narrative happening now? It is not as if businesses have just now starting trying to get more out of their employees. That has been the case for time immemorial. Is it because the economy is down? This isn't the first downturn in the economy since the advent of social news. Is it a """post"""-pandemic, getting people back into the office scare tactic?

I'd like to get some broad opinions about the timing, if possible.

EDIT: I realized that all the possibilities I listed point to businesses being bad actors, I didn't really intend to paint it that way. I'm open to considering both side.

>why is this narrative happening now?

I think that it has a lot to do with the massive resurgence of labor organizing we've seen across the globe; People saw how much bullshit they're forced to deal with while applying for and doing their jobs. Seeing record breaking profits while facing down skyrocketing inflation, in many cases without so much as a COL adjustment, and have had enough. Meanwhile, these companies know, even if they refuse to acknowledge it, that labor creates value; If you can get more value out of something at the same or less cost that makes your bottom line look better, why would they not try and work employees as much as they can for the same price? So now businesses want to make it seem like employees are to blame for refusing to allow themselves to be continually exploited in the same manner, which is why it is framed as 'quiet quitting' instead of 'only doing what they're paid to do'.

I also think that the pandemic/WFH may have given people a reason/time to do some reevaluation of what is important to them, what they want to invest their time into, and what they want to do with their lives generally, and me personally, it isn't to spend my life clicking buttons to make some number somewhere go up.

Unless the interest is making money for shareholders then corporations are not moral. The only non-regulatory way to force a company to do the desired thing is through the cost/benefit tradeoffs which are communicated through money. Like Milton Friedman drilled.

I think it's a response to the Anti-work trend that really exploded a year or so ago.

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