So… Doing your job well is “quiet quitting” now? I don’t want my boss to think I’m quiet quitting, I Guess I’ll have to underperform instead.
Quiet firing on the other hand is giving raises that are under inflation. Companies should stop this quiet firing shit.
Giving raises? My employer quiet quit that more than a decade ago. Meanwhile inflation and price gouging march on.
What proportion of people have jumped ship in the last ~8 years as a result? (Understand you could have good reason for sticking around.)
It’s a very small company. About 1/3 have moved on. The attraction is that it’s relatively accommodating for other things in your life.
News organizations have employees as well. It doesn’t surprise me that they are in on the gaslighting.
I am not placing blame, just observing that News Companies still have staff and could be on the side of the Capitalists when it comes to worker rights.
Edit: I think I understand. I agree, not all staff writers (or any?) could be in a position to refuse the editor when they say “write me a piece on quiet quitting”.
this. every so often someone posts an article on how wages are beating inflation and im like. where? who? this is not my experience.
I’ve taken a pay cut two years in a row for that reason. Last year was somewhat understandable with the insane inflation but this year kind of stung
How is taking a pay cut when there’s massive inflation even remotely understandable? Inflation means that they need to pay you more, not less; your costs are rising.
Businesses don’t care about your costs. They care about paying as little as possible for as good a quality as they can.
Same way you don’t care if your grocery store mega chain got hacked and lost $300 million, that’s not your problem, if they raise the price of bread you’ll go somewhere else.
Find another job. You’ll quickly find out if you are worth the raise you wanted. My bet is you are.
I can’t wait until AI hits these middle managers that were just enough good at their jobs to earn a promotion and now spend their days sending angry emails to the people that actually do the work, while collecting more income than the workers… 🖕
“Quiet quitting” is a bullshit term meaning to do your job but nothing above or beyond that. Joshua Fluke has done multiple videos on this BS, and at this point there are plenty of other idiotic terms thrown around to try and make workers look bad.
It was always a stupid fucking term that equates doing a job with quitting.
Not increasing pay isn’t quit firing, because there is no firing. It is just businesses being stingy.
Edit: Guess I wasn’t clear enough that I am responding to the general statement that not giving raises is constructive dismissal, and didn’t add a footnote that not giving raises to specific people could be part of constructive dismissal. Nuance is hard.
Not increasing pay isn’t quit firing, because there is no firing. It is just businesses being stingy.
it’s constructive dismissal.
I feel like meeting that to a legal level is a stretch. Minor cost of living raises that don’t meet inflation doesn’t rise to that level in my uneducated understanding
Not increasing pay with inflation is a pay cut because your pay is literally worth less without it.
In a sane world, if the fed is dictating the money supply, with their actions directly impacting inflation, every workers pay should be indexed to inflation. Same goes for taxation, welfare payments, etc. Companies raise their prices regardless.
Quiet quitting is the practice of meeting minimum expectations with low moral or engagement. Underperforming could lead to termination for not meeting minimum expectations.
Woosh.
Also quiet quitting isn’t anything except a bullshit term dreamed up by capitalist crybabies.
More like inexperienced middle-management. Discussing the team member’s reasons for disengagement could lead to a solution for them, or even multiple team members. Saying “I have nothing to complain about” proves ineffective leadership looking for cause to terminate.
The issue many people have is how some bosses redefine underperforming as “not doing enough unpaid overtime”.
Well that’s completely fucked. I don’t work for free. That’s also illegal.
Quiet quitting: doing what you’re paid for
Normal working: doing what you’re paid for but also asking managers for more work when you’re done -> that’s what’s expected from management and also takes some load off their shoulders, they love that
Over achievement: doing what you’re paid for and more without asking management -> management will promise you a seat at the table of you continue doing that long enough!
If there’s advancement opportunities try to do the second one until you reach a point where you’re happy and then do the first one :)
If they deep throat the boot hard enough, maybe they’ll get to wear it someday!
I’m a skeptic when it comes to lots of things where the common man is getting fucked.
May I ask y’all how highly-paid individuals in high positions came to be that way?
Are they ALL the results of nepotistic practices, ALL inheritors of wealth? Or 80% got there that way?
(In the SF Bay Area, certainly seems I know high performers who work their asses off, make shit tons of money, get promotions before jumping ship to other companies, work at startups that get acquired…)
Disclaimer: not endorsing neglecting your family or personal life for a pipe dream of prosperity, just sharing one perspective
Edit: I forgot, the argument could easily be “the vast majority of high earners got there by job hopping”!
If you don’t have any advancement opportunities where you’re working change job or work your wage. Same if you don’t want to move up, work your wage.
I don’t know why you guys don’t get it…
Tell me you’re 14 and have never worked a day in your life without telling me you’re 14 and have never worked a day in your life.
Not a manager, just someone who did exactly what I said, worked a bit harder for a year and a half, moved two steps up the ladder and now sitting cozy doing exactly what I’m paid for and nothing more as I don’t want to move any higher because it would mean being in a position of authority.
Do you really think I would tell you to aim to reach a point where you’re happy and then start to work your wage if I was a manager?
Or crawl so far up management’s ass while throwing all your coworkers under the bus. THAT is how you get ahead. Stepping on your coworkers.
I actually thought you were joking until the last sentence
Get off your knees, you slave
“you slave”
He said to the guy telling others to reach the point where they’re happy with what they’re doing and to then work their wage and nothing more.
If I was on my knees in front of management I would be telling everyone to just keep working harder forever, not to stop doing it once they don’t have or want advancement opportunities.
I had an employee review with my manager this week, at my request. She told me she wasn’t comfortable uptraining me right now even though they badly need the help in the position I asked to be crosstrained for, because they’d rather hire someone just for the role; but we could talk about it again in two months. After a little digging, I found that (A) they can’t afford to lose me from my lower-paid role and (2) they know I’m looking for another job and don’t want to train me until I demonstrate I’m planning to stay.
My response is that (A) well you’re definitely gonna lose me now and (2) I’m definitely no longer willing to stay.
Similar situation on my end awhile back. Location had begun losing people. I was in a bottom rung management position, more title than authority, and the team knew it. However, I was also the only manager willing to be consistently on later shifts. Due to pretty intense compartmentalization issues were often isolated and fixed by managers within each department. Except later on at night I was alone with a smaller team. This presented a bit of a situation:
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If a problem came up I was expected to text or call a manager. As you can imagine, they did not often reply or pick up.
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Many problems require rather immediate solutions.
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I wasn’t being trained to receive the skills necessary to deal with many situations so I began enabling key members of the evening team and standing in front of them if mistakes were made, acting as a wall.
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Due to all of this, and a lot of work being handled by a smaller team, (and some issues going consistently ignored by senior management) we saw several people leave. In the middle of all this I was isolated and made out to be the reason for some systemic issues, told I could no longer take the initiative to help, and the team caught wind.
Eventually I began looking for other jobs. When I let my bosses know boy were they surprised. By the time I left one manager had claimed to have started having anxiety attacks during their shift, the whole unreachable during situations thing became a problem for upper, and well…long story short shit and fan began to meet.
If a problem came up I was expected to text or call a manager. As you can imagine, they did not often reply or pick up.
Many problems require rather immediate solutions.
These are not your problems. If management has enacted a procedure that doesn’t work, don’t change it or you will be blamed for any failure.
Send a few emails to document your opinion that there are problems. Otherwise, do exactly what was recommended. You want the policy to fail. Don’t try to improve it without management support.
I learned this in my previous job. We were a city-owned theater, which came with all of the trappings of government bureaucracy. But we were also open after hours, and did a lot of technical work for our shows. The city’s IT would log off on Friday at 5pm, and not log back in again until 8am on Monday. We were one of the few departments that was open over the weekend and after hours, (often until 1 or 2am when loading shows out.)
So naturally, we butted heads with IT a lot. Because we didn’t have access to change things we often needed to change. Whenever we needed to urgently troubleshoot something before a show started, our hands were almost always tied by IT. And IT’s given solution was always the same. Submit a ticket, and we’ll get to it when we get to it. But when you have 2000 people waiting on a show to start at 7pm on a Saturday, you can’t wait for IT to get back into the office on Monday.
Historically, the solution was to use our own gear. Every technician had their own personal laptop, so they could use that instead of the city laptop. But this caused issues of its own, because we couldn’t connect to any of the city-controlled gear as the city network was MAC filtered, (and IT obviously wasn’t going to allow our personal devices to connect to their network.) We worked with what we had, worked around problems we couldn’t fix, and it was a lot of extra stress for no extra benefit; The higher-ups didn’t see a problem because the shows were never visibly impacted. And IT didn’t see a problem, because the higher-ups weren’t complaining.
Eventually, we just started letting it burn. Shows suddenly started 15 to 30 minutes late, (which was unheard of in a building where even 2 minutes late was considered unacceptable.) Clients didn’t get equipment they had paid for, because it was broken on Friday evening and we couldn’t troubleshoot it over the weekend. Projectors didn’t have video feeds, because techs stopped using their personal laptops for shows. Et cetera, et cetera. Instead, the techs simply started noting every time they wanted to fix something but couldn’t because their hands were tied.
And wouldn’t you know it, the system got fixed. IT was suddenly required to keep someone on call for weekend tickets. Because when people stop propping up the broken system, all of the flaws get discovered and heads roll until shit gets fixed.
I remember doing self assessments before reviews, I just gave myself 5s because they were going to change everything to 3.5 anyhow unless you invented cold fusion and sucked everyone’s dick
Nice, how did you do your digging? Some key relationships in the company?
I asked questions during the review. My.manager was evasive but it wasn’t hard to put together. In the restaurant industry, everyone is hiring right now as they expand for patio season. That won’t be the case as much in two months and we both know it; if I’m going to leave it’ll likely be in the next two weeks.
To be fair (2) is kinda understandable, but this has to be the most incompetent management ever.
If they communicated better, and offered the training/position/salary increase as incentive to stay, that would (imo) be a better course of action. This just feels rude and incompetent
Well I mean I am awful with people, but this problem even I could solve. They had about 3 possible holes to fit the peg through, but no, they just threw the toybox out of the window.
MAYBE OP is just awful at their job. But if they wanted to keep him where he was, that makes little sense.
Somewhat related, advice about being irreplaceable is bad for this exact reason. The more replaceable you are, the easier to promote you and take longer vacations. Sure you might be able to get fired more easily, but most managers won’t put forth the effort.
At this point, you don’t fucking care. Go to their manager and tell them about it.
Doing your job at a high standard is a problem? Who makes this garbage up?
It’s companies gaslighting us that we are either looking for new roles, or we are working hard to make more money/ask for a raise or else we’ll find a new role.
Managers see both these things as “not being part of the fam”, but really they just want to take more and give less while playing the victim.
Yeah I always thought ‘quiet quitters’ referred to people checking out of their jobs emotionally and doing just barely enough to not get fired, so actually underperforming, not because they couldn’t do better but because they stopped caring at some point. In that sense they have already quit, quietly. But now it seems that anyone who doesn’t go above and beyond can be a ‘quiet quitter’? Doesn’t make much sense to me.
Nah, quit quitting is just the new term for it. Boomers called it working to the letter of your contract. Quit quitting isn’t doing less than your job duties. It’s simply refusing to bend over backwards and give your employer all of your free time. You don’t take on extra responsibility. You don’t come in early or stay late. You come in on time, do your exact job duties as written, then you go home.
But this terrifies employers, who have historically relied on manipulation and coercion to get employees to work beyond the scope of what they were hired for. So they’ve started calling it “quit quitting” in an effort to rebrand it as something negative.
I’ve known people who are the best workers on their team, but put in like 40% effort. Does that count as quiet quitting? IDK.
To be clear, I’m not excusing the article, which is a bad joke. That being said, there are plenty of people out there that are really good at their jobs, but don’t put in full effort. I don’t have a problem with these people at all (really who does 100% effort all of the time?).
They don’t just want your work output; they want your soul.
They want the old days where people were 100% believers in their jobs at places like WeWork, Uber, Tesla, and Facebook…before the general public became disillusioned with tech companies specifically and companies in general more broadly. They want “evangelists” and the belief of the mid-Obama years back…
The only problem is that many have looked at things over the last ten years and found that the euphoric promises made by the management of companies were lies.
Neither the site nor the author point to any of this being satire, unfortunately.
They’re just that much detached from reality.
There’s a great reply to this in the same publication: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/2024/04/27/quiet-quitters-or-good-workers/
Sir, – I read with interest Olive Keogh’s article (“Quiet quitting: You always had workers who did 9-5 but it’s a creeping malaise, employers say”, April 25th).
The article defines working one’s contract hours as a form of quitting, a contortion of fact that I have struggled to grasp since laying eyes on it.
It is asserted that employees are obliged to put in extra hours, do additional work and recalibrate their work-life balance for the “benefits” of social capital, “wellbeing” and career success.
I have a novel proposal. Pay employees in actual capital for the additional time they are expected to work.
Dispense with the relaxation classes on their lunch breaks and the sweet treats and the tokenistic attitude of management to the labour that drives their business.
Instead, resource staff sufficiently to complete work within business hours, respect the rights of staff to a fulfilling life not defined by their day jobs, and stop using gaslighting terms like “quiet quitting” for fulfilling the terms of their contract of employment.
This may seem radical to those managers who have been around the block, but KPIs (key performance indicators) don’t spend time with my loved ones nor do they put food on the table. – Yours, etc,
SHANE FITZPATRICK,
Dublin 7.
That letter is way too polite for the “go fuck yourselves” that I had in mind… I honestly think we should start actually spitting in the faces of managers of that kind that we happen to know in private life, be it family or neighbors, just show them disdain and disgust coming from people whom they have no power over.
Agreed. However, the letter you or I might have written probably wouldn’t have been published. Haha.
Unionize people. I joined a union and there’s no “we’re a team” bullshit or the boss going “do me a favor”. 4pm hits, you drop what you’re doing and go home. You get paid for your job, and the union fees are nothing considering the pay is way higher for union workers in my field.
Depends on the Union, sadly. My wife was a Union rep, she had a grievence, the higher up union leaders and the employer met ahead of her scheduled meeting and screwed her over in the grievance meeting. I’m not sure if she was more mad at losing the grievance, or having to pay dues to be screwed by the union.
This happens at my job too. Overall the benefits of my union far outweigh how shit they are and the union dues. I’d rather have a crappy union than none at all.
I know my company would screw me over much worse than my union and company combined if there was no union.
I’ve found having a spine is much more beneficial than remaining at a job a person hates and expected some union rep to do the looking out for yourself on your behalf.
My unionized company changed our mandated hours from 45 hours a week to 50 hours a week like 2 weeks after I joined it was one of the shittiest jobs I ever had. Pay was good but only because I was forced to sit there for 10 hours a day lol
Imagine how shitty that job would have been without a union!
Unions dont make shitty jobs better, dude, get a clue.
I don’t think these problems should be dismissed out of hand. There is guidance out there on how to take back a shitty union.
The UAW has long been neutered with poor leadership, and sometimes leadership that gets thrown in jail for good reasons. They’ve recently rebuilt and are making huge gains.
It’s fine though I quit it and got a normal non union job that’s incredible. Better starting pay better benefits more time off no forced OT while I can work as much OT I want. Gravy job so glad I quit.
One of the very few interviews in my life that I ended early was the one where in the third hour of it, they usually mentioned that the (competitive) salary was based on a 45 hour work week, with “occasional” mandatory overtime as the needs of the company dictated.
Knowing from earlier that they were very short at the position I was interviewing for, I asked for a more specific answer on what I could expect as “occasional” and the response was, “Well the work for your position has been backlogged since the previous employee quit, so for the first 3 to 6 months you can expect to work 50-60 hours each week, every week. After that, it will probably only be two weeks a month. But you can work those extra hours on the weekends too, so it’s not as bad as it sounds!”
I was already done but I did some quick mental math and realized that dividing even their higher salary by that many more hours, not only was it insanely more work but was actually like a 15% pay cut, in terms of hourly rate, than the job I currently had.
I explained this to the guy and asked how much wiggle room there was on salary and he basically said something to the effect of, “Maybe in a few years you can negotiate salary, but coming in you’re really in no position to argue for more pay.”
So I thanked him for his time and told him the interview was over.