As a connoisseur of the journalistic art of spinning out fake trends that exist solely to spark heated reactions from readers on the internet, I appreciate the invention of “quiet quitting”.
The term, which can be loosely defined as “people half-assing it at work”, may provoke in you the irrepressible urge to shout: “That’s not new!” Which means it is doing its job as a trend piece. As a piece of social analysis, though, it is most useful for its flaws: it’s just more evidence that the working people of today have all of the frustrations that working people have always had – but they’ve forgotten what we’re actually supposed to do about it.
“Quiet quitting” emerged, like so many pseudo-trends, from the roiling seas of social media, and was then professionally assimilated into the national pseudo-trend ecosystem by a number of mainstream news outlets. It consists of the declarations of people across the country that, as one young worker said: “You’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond” on the job. Well, sure. Aren’t we all?
The real question is not whether this rebranded collective sense of malaise is something new or measurable or even “real” – believe me when I tell you that engaging with trend stories in good faith is a recipe for insanity – but rather, what it says about us that this sort of grasping attempt to put a common feeling into new words seems to strike such a chord in everyone.
And what it says is … Yowz! We really need to teach people about unions.
I’m not trying to be glib here. There is a bottomless appetite for the latest made-up term for the feeling of being so burned out by your shitty job that you just give up. This tells me, above all, that there are and continue to be a lot of people who are burned out by their shitty jobs, and who feel a tingling dopamine hit of recognition when they hear someone describe that familiar feeling. That, in and of itself, is not great. The good news is, we know how to fix that. Because many, many people have been right there with you before.
How do you think the early coalminers in West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Montana felt? How about the seamstresses locked up in firetrap sweatshops a hundred years ago? How about the entire, miserable majority of the 20th century’s workforce? The child laborers, the black sleeping car porters who suffered racism and disrespect, the factory workers who lost their fingers in the machines, the sexually harassed flight attendants with no recourse? Hell, millions of people have felt burned out by their shitty jobs, for generations and generations before you. I say this not to mock those of you who find solace in the latest TikTok buzzword, but to encourage you. Because all of those beaten-down people who felt the very same way you do in years past figured out something that could make it better. They organized.
And what happened? The coalminers organized and won a strong union in the face of their violent coal baron bosses. The seamstresses organized and helped invent workplace safety laws. The sleeping car porters organized and produced one of the greatest labor leaders in American history, a key figure in the civil rights movement. The factory workers organized and built this nation’s middle class. The flight attendants organized, and you can be very sure that you will get kicked off a plane today if you treat them in the way that was common in 1950.
All of these groups of workers, people just as burnt out and fed up as you feel, organized and made unions and fought back against the companies and bosses and faceless investors who only cared about squeezing them for everything they could. (While they were at it, they banned child labor and invented the weekend.) All of these working people did not quit. Nor were they quiet. They knew what was wrong, and they fixed it. Loudly.
The impulse to react to your job’s exploitation of you by doing what you can to exploit them with your own laziness is utterly human. But it is important, very important, that young people today who have become disillusioned with the bullshit lies of capitalism know that there is a better way. That way is to organize. Your boss doesn’t fear you quietly quitting. That is, at best, a minor annoyance, one that can be overcome by just continuing to churn through low-wage workers like a bunch of paper towels, to be discarded and replaced at the first sign of trouble. That sort of thing is the entire business model of many of America’s worst employers. They love that. They want to use you up and slide you out the door when you can no longer muster the energy to serve them. They’re fine with that.
What your awful, rich, heartless bosses do not want under any circumstances is a well-organized and pissed off labor union in their companies. That would really screw them. That is something they cannot discard. That is something they are forced to deal with, by law. It is one of the only things that can actually make them stop treating their employees – you – like trash. Why, if you were to channel all of that angst and fury and cynicism that your job has instilled in you into organizing a union, well … that would make your boss very unhappy. They might even let out a long, painful sort of moan. It would be sad.
I do not blame anyone for feeling like you want to just say “the hell with it” to your crap job. It is the labor movement’s own fault that we have not educated all the soon-to-be-disappointed young people entering the working world on what unions are all about. But that can change. And you can be the one to change it. Organize. Don’t do it for the historical precedent, or the political imperative, or the economic gains. Do it to make your boss cry.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York