Your “Quiet Quitting” is Quietly Killing Your Co-Workers

You know that, right…?

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I really hoped the discourse around “quiet quitting” would settle down sooner, but much like the lovely Great Resignation some workers survived last year, this new pithy phrase is still ripe and ready for exceptionally bad hot takes all around.

Here’s the thing: “quiet quitting” is not a new thing, my sweet Zoomers. Y’all didn’t invent doing the bare minimum required of you OR setting healthy boundaries, you’ve just made the algorithms pay more attention to both of them and thus promote for more visibility and “engagement” among the normies and by extension The Bosses, so… Congrats?

“Quiet Quitting” is absolutely a misnomer for workers doing their job and nothing more, but that’s not the sense that has been creeping under my skin for the last year or so, and has only been growing. I’ve watched coworkers leave for better opportunities (and then get laid off six months later, or go freelance for three months and end up FT elsewhere, or go to an independent shop that is promptly acquired by a larger conglomerate), and I do not ever begrudge colleagues who leave for more money, better benefits, true flexibility, etc. I’ve been left behind by coworkers I truly loved at companies I truly hated, and I’ve always managed to move on myself, eventually. So it’s not that.

It’s the sense I’ve been getting from writers and columnists that there are only be two parties affected by so-called Quiet Quitting: the Quitter and their Manager/Boss. This was similar to the discourse around The Great Resignation last year, too — the only relevant people are the Resignee and whomever signs their paychecks. The Individual is always either a heroic inspiration for those of us who do not dream of labor or an entitled, money- and power-hungry goldbricker preventing their well-meaning overlords from reconciling any growth this quarter — depending on which publication you’re reading.

The quiet part that I finally have to start wondering out loud is:

What about the rest of us?

Photo by Bob Price from Pexels