Is It Quiet Quitting Or Is It Not Getting Fucked?

 

 

 

"There Is Always One - Self Portrait"

Nikon D800
Nikkor 50.0mm 1.4 Lens

LightRoom
SnapSeed

During the pandemic, there was a rash of employees quitting their jobs. Apparently - facing the real possibility of serious illness and possible death (94.5 million Covid cases - 1.04 million dead Americans) tipped the work/life balance scales to favor life.. And so - employees left their shitty jobs and shittier bosses in droves.  Another work behavior became prominent and continues even now. Managers call it "quiet quitting" or doing just enough to keep one's job. Quiet quitters they say, won't take on extra work, won't work late, and (horrors) won't work on weekends. Quiet quitters are seen as a problem for businesses used to being able to purchase most of an employees waking hours with, charitably speaking, middling wages.  As a life-long quiet quitter, I look at it another way. I worked to live, not the other way around. I saw work as a way to support my family. While I did an excellent job when working, I did not give away my life with off-hours work, late night email correspondence and certainly not weekend work. I had two reasons for this: 1.) We live in a capitalist system. Goods and services are purchased at a price set by the market. Companies are relentless in pursuing the best deal they can when it comes to obtaining things they need. The Joe Big Ass Corp (for instance) was scrupulous when it came to getting the best deal it could with suppliers and employees.. As an employee, I bought into this 100%. I never wanted to be under-compensated for my work hours. The JBA Corp never ever gave away its products for free.  Likewise, I strove to never ever give away my life for free. And so - like a good capitalist - I worked hard to enforce the limits of what I was prepared to give in return for my salary. The JBA Corp was, after all, not a charity, and most definitely was not my family. 2.) I decided early on in my "career" that the most important thing to me was my family. I wanted to be there for volleyball games, dance recitals, vocal performances, after-school pickups, gigs, suppers, breakfasts, weekends, and late night conversations.  So - during the forty hours a week that the JBA Corp paid me, I gave them excellent work as evidenced by sparkling reviews and by surviving for decades under a policy of  every year identifying and disposing of "poor performers" (read "old dudes"). At the end of the day though, I snapped the laptop shut and didn't engage with "changing the world" or whatever slogan was being pedaled at the time, until the following morning.   And lastly - I made sure that I took every single vacation and personal day allotted to me. Every. Single. One.. I encouraged the people that worked for me to do the same. (see point #1 above.) So - I see the recent uptick in "quiet quitting" to be a quite positive development. To me, it means that finally workers are pushing back on the notion that when a company hires you, they own your ass and all of your waking hours.

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