It’s fair to say that few people are having a great time at work right now. This summer has seen everyone from railway workers and education staff to lawyers and postal workers take strike action in protest of low wages; astronomical energy bills and inflation mean our payslips don’t go anywhere near as far as they used to, and the revolution in workplace practices that some thought might be sparked by the pandemic has largely failed to materialise. And all the while, TikToks, Instagram infographics and SEO-optimised news stories have dealt with it in the only way they know how: with a lexicon full of catchy new hashtags for age-old mistreatment.
This month it’s all about ‘quiet quitting’, the concept of mentally checking out of work and doing the bare minimum while still holding on to your job. That comes hot on the heels of The Great Resignation, an anti-work phenomenon in which high numbers of employees apparently left their jobs en-masse in 2021. Coining social media-friendly slogans like these isn’t exclusively a post-pandemic pastime, though: phrases like ‘burnout’ and ‘side-hustle’ are now so commonplace as to be unremarkable, but each only fully emerged within the last decade in self-help books, online columns and social media posts.
It’s not a coincidence that this new vocabulary has materialised at this point in time. As all the strikes, columns and posts would suggest, things are about as bad for workers as they ever have been. The lifetimes of most millennials can be tracked against the weakening of trade unions and the related erosion of rights at work. The result has been the exploitative gig economy, zero-hour contracts, a lack of high-quality jobs, and bosses getting richer while we get gradually poorer. No wonder we want to talk about it — but is a growing list of new corporate buzzwords really the best way to do so?
In reality, we already have the words to describe our dissatisfaction and the dynamics that lead to it in the first place. Unions, experts and workers themselves have been speaking articulately for decades about the exploitation of ordinary working people by bosses, and about how the relationship between the two is designed in a way that means it can never really be equal. In other words, The Great Resignation might have made for some lively post-pandemic discourse, but the factors underpinning the mass exodus of workers we’re seeing are nothing new.
Likewise, work-related stress and overwork existed long before we called it burnout and, as others have pointed out, even concepts like ‘quiet quitting’, which initially seem extremely specific, have already been named: working to rule is an age-old union tactic in which workers refuse any work beyond that which they’re formally contracted to do. And that’s before you even get to the inherent bleakness in a phrase which suggests something radical or subversive about completing the work you were asked to, within the time period you were given to do it.
The irony is that while these terms are seemingly coined to name and clarify specific phenomena, they actually work to obscure what’s really going on. Sold to us uncritically as ‘economic trends’ or evidence of ‘the new normal at work’, few go much further than a hashtag or make any attempt to analyse what they describe structurally or in a wider context. Maybe millennials and Gen Z just have a different relationship to work, readers idly ponder. It’s probably to do with their work ethic.
So where are our bosses hiding amongst all this jargon? You’d be forgiven for thinking workers were downing tools, logging off and spontaneously burning out of their own volition and not because of any particular treatment or workplace culture. Perhaps if The Great Resignation were known as The Great Mistreatment, or ‘quiet quitting’ as ‘loud exploitation’, then we might have a clearer understanding of the reality.
Of course, there’s a reason they’re not — just as they have more power than us in our workplaces, bosses as a class also have more power than workers when it comes to controlling the public narrative, thanks to friends in high places — like the mastheads of newspapers and boards of tech companies. As union leaders like Mick Lynch have shown this summer, when workers are allowed to speak for themselves, they can put forward messages just as punchy and potentially viral as any zeitgeist-y hashtag. But with them rarely being given the chance to, our public conversation about work remains framed and controlled by the boss class instead.
If we’re going to change anything for the better, it will be through collective action, solidarity, and calling things what they are, not indulging in HR doublespeak which puts the blame in the wrong places and obscures the power relations at play. To understand why vast swathes of workers are quitting or refusing to go the extra mile, we need to understand the conditions they’re being expected to put up with, and be able to talk about, how capitalist structures created them. And to challenge those structures we need to see the issues as collective and not individual. Our bosses already have control over so much of our lives — we shouldn’t let them rebrand how badly they treat us too.
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