ROFL This is madness! I’d love to know who is behind this push to gaslight people into believing that having a great work/life balance is something to be frowned upon!
tacit admission that you started a business but you really wanted to start a cult. tell you what: you start paying me as much as you possibly can regardless of our employment agreement, I'll start working as much as I possibly can regardless of our employment agreement.
Yep. I want a reasonable amount of money for a reasonable amount of work. I have a life outside work, which seems incomprehensible to employers nowadays.
So let me get this straight. People are completing jobs then slow rolling it to the end of the day to turn in those completed jobs so they don't have to do additional work? Is that correct?
If someone could clarify what a quit quitter is that would be great.
When I started my current job they told me the position was 45 hours/week. For my salary and task load that sounded reasonable. After that 45 I am gone and they respect my boundaries, which was honestly unexpected.
I think "quiet quiting" specifically refers to a sliding of your norms that remain within the outlined KPIs. For example, if you usually respond to requests within the hour and the organizational requirement is within 1 business day, starting to not respond to requests until they've sat for several hours without any actual change to your workload would be very noticeable, but ultimately its still well within the required timeframe
a quiet quitter is someone who does their job. they use a lot of tone, insinuation and connotation talking about it, but if you press them for a definition, a quiet quitter is someone who does their job.
You know there's no definition of "quiet quitter" that makes sense to the people seriously using the term. They can't exactly say, "someone who does their job as specified in their official job duties" or "someone we can't abuse because they know labor law". Otherwise, nobody will sympathize with their goals (i.e., asking for things they aren't paying for).
To me, it's doing your job just well enough that they can't actually fire you for anything, but no so well that you're being taken advantage of.
I also call it "proper time management" I properly manage my time so I can get all of MY work done in the time allocated to me, it's not my fault other people have terrible time management.
My understanding is the following: In companies, it is assumed that employees will try to reach for the promotion, getting a higher position for a higher pay. Managers have been trained to use that to push people to do more than what is strictly required of them, letting people think that's how they'll progress their career. Quiet quitter are people that simply stopped aiming for the promotion, they do what their job entail and that's it, no more trying to get more, no extra, no internal politics. They don'tgive a fuck about all this, all they wantis the paycheck and to enjoy their life away from all this non-sense.
They pinned the term quiet quitter, because this is usually the behavior of an employee that is about to quit the company for another position elsewhere, except quiet quitter don't plan on quitting.
Quiet quitting has always referred to the extra bullshit that employers pressure employees into doing.
In America we've fallen into this work culture that implies you aren't really part of a team unless you are constantly putting forth more than what the employer is paying you for.
The undertone of this headline is that managers feel uneasy because so-called "quiet quitters" won't take on extra work or unpaid hours or exhibit overwhelming enthusiasm, but just do literally what they have to at a passable or high quality.
The gaslighting part is that those workers aren't doing anything wrong, but they aren't bending over backwards for their employers, so corporate America wants to paint the picture that those workers are awful time thieves instead of just burnt out wage slaves.
Oh absolutely. In Japan for example if you are unable to work or you get removed from your career, it is socially understandable for you to consider suicide. Lots of Japanese citizens put their job before even their families or the potential of having a family.
It's actually pretty fuckin crazy what Japanese work culture does to their citizens.
I've been reading Graeber's Bullshit Jobs and evidently they don't fire people in Japan. If they want rid of you, they just give you less and less to do until you're sitting in the office all day getting paid to do nothing, and the cultural expectation is that you quit out of shame rather than just accepting money for nothing.
Heh. I already am that, but I do have to work. It's not as hard as when I was digging ditches for a living, but it's definitely still work. Sometimes it's slow, sometimes there's a million things to do.
I'll be honest, I don't know if I have to work. I do, because I like the work and I like the company I work for a lot, but I'm fairly confident that I could just show up to meetings twice a week and fudge paperwork for quite a while before anyone caught on that I'm just a hole they're dumping money into.
I wonder if this also has something to do with the company itself avoiding shame too. Like firing an employee is a sign of weakness, that you hired someone like that in the first place? Or potentially a difference in benefits or a pension that they have to pay?
That's a thought I had as well, and based on my extremely limited knowledge and research I think it's the conflict that's being avoided. Rather than dealing with the person directly, you use indirect actions that signal the expected result when taken in that social context and then let the pressure of those expectations generate the result you need without you ever directly doing anything. My understanding is that the pressure is pretty enormous, your coworkers will basically shun you out of fear of being targeted themselves and resentment for all the work you're not doing that they have to pick up instead.
Look up China's 669 practice. South Korea is also known for having an especially brutal work culture. The two manage to make even Japan's work culture look almost reasonable by comparison (Japan famously requiring long hours and lifelong dedication to your employer).
The idea is that they complete tasks ahead of schedule and then slow play results to the predetermined deadlines. It's hilarious to me that people are saying this is a genZ thing, since this shit has been going on in tech fields forever. Literally everyone I have ever known has taken "working vacations" by pretending some work is taking longer than it really is.
Bonus points if you are smart enough to still turn it in a day early to keep the heat low.
Yep just me doing extra work for no salary... well. I dunno. Company just implemented a new bonus structure based on the hours you record per project. I know it's just so they can see who's underperformed to fire, but I might get quarterly bonuses now for working longer hours.
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,
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.
This has got to be made by the same type of shitheads who churn out clickbait excrement every five minutes, in a different section of the clickbait excrement factory, opposite side of where they churn out "Physicist Brian Cox's terrifying reveal - CERN at Switzerland unlocked demon forces, world's end by 2025".
Or you're being trolled and got those big red shiny buttons pushed.
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.
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
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.
I'm in the UAW, we used to not be able to vote on leadership. Now we can, and with a guy like Shawn Fain in the big chair I feel like we've already come a long way. I voted for him and I'll do it again.
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.
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.
Being in a union is as much about sticking up for your fellow workers as is it is about "looking after No1".
Sure, if you don't like your job you could just quit and move on, but that's not always a choice. You could organise as a workforce that fights to make work better not just for yourself and your colleagues, but for your fellow countrymen and your children's generation too.
Irish Times is known for their clickbait articles. Not too long ago, an article that was written just to generate outrage (fake tan is cultural appropriation), was found to be generated by AI, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was also the case. My advice is to ignore anything Irish Times is writing. (I've been living in Ireland for well over a decade, and I learned to regard IT as the low end of the already poor media landscape here.)
I was just going to say, of all places, this gets published by an Irish news outlet? Hah! It has been my experience moving there that in workplaces in Ireland is you go there, do your job and go home. No bullshit, the workplace is not a family, your colleagues are not your friends. In and out. Very efficient while on the clock, couldn’t give a fuck immediately after.
As organized labor gains more steam, this is the kind of bullshit that's going to be thrust in front of our eyes on the "news" more, and more, and more.
is there a stat somewhere that agrees with this? please say yes and share a link; i would like to believe this is true, but evidence suggests that a union's biggest hurdle is still convincing white people that non-white people need to be in their union too.
Overall, it shows union rates being mostly a wash in 2023, but that's due to a large increase in total jobs that year; raw number of members went up, rate slightly declined. Black workers made up almost the entire grid increase.
The point that maybe relates most to what OP was saying:
These statistics don’t capture the number of workers who want to join unions. Evidence suggests that in 2023, more than 60 million workers wanted to join a union but couldn’t do so.
This reply came more from the big wins Labor has experienced the last two years, such as the auto, rail, and writers' strikes being resolved, not individual stats.
I think there's also the problem of certain sectors of work, like tech or retail, which should be unionized but aren't. Either because a lack of a history of unionization or because companies can too easily close a location and open another one across the street.
I love the desperate calls. But not instantly, you get them like a week later, every single time. Sometimes they schedule a super important meeting where they HAVE TO talk to you and just cancel it a day or two before it because they realize it's futile.
