Quiet quitting is taking over TikTok — or at least that is what I hear from coverage in Australian, British, and American news. Quiet quitting, I am told, is launching a direct assault on the foundations of our economy, doing only the minimum required at work — taking full breaks, leaving at 5pm, refusing unpaid overtime.
To be clear, the quiet quitters are still doing their jobs. They are fulfilling every contracted requirement, every scheduled hour, every task that falls within their job description. The only thing they are refusing to do is anything above and beyond these requirements.
In the eyes of Allison Langdon from the Today show — a worker only in the industry of manufacturing consent — this clearly means slacking off, as she immediately made clear in her interview with recruitment expert Raife Watson. This attitude seems to be shared by all the major media reports on the new TikTok trend. From Today to Today (Australia), USA Today to the Today programme, the media is taking a stand against ungrateful millennials and zoomers who don’t know the value of hard work.
But as it turns out, that might be exactly the reason this trend has gone viral; people do know the value of hard work — and it is more than they are being paid.
First, it seems a bit rich to claim that people are somehow cheating their employers by fulfilling their contracted work and hours. The last few years have shown workers the truth of just how much they are valued by their employers — and how essential they are to the production process. Burnout is up, wages are down, and workplace loyalty seems to be a one-way street.
Inflation — blamed on supply chain issues, manifested by corporations raising prices, and paid for by workers — is the final straw.
People are beginning to understand that every extra minute they spend at work is an extra dollar in the pocket of their boss. Workers in many front line, essential industries have recognized both sides of this, both the productive power and the rampant exploitation. From Starbucks to Amazon and beyond, they are organizing to fight back. Many other workers, particularly in offices where the value production is more ethereal, don’t have such a clear path to recourse.
So they quietly, slowly, individually withdraw their labor by increments. They put in the work, asked for the raise, waited for the promotion, and were ignored.
Surveys have shown that quiet quitting is often a last resort for workers who see no other pathway to negotiation. So they clock off, take their lunch breaks, use their PTO, and let that email wait until the morning.
But quiet quitting is not the invention of entitled millennials who don’t want to work. It is the continuation of a tradition going back over 100 years to the time of militant labor organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Back then it went by a different name: working to rule.
Work to rule was a form of slowdown, practiced by workers from the US to the Philippines to Western Europe. Workers whose demands were not met would stay on the job, but do only enough work to earn the wages they received — by their own reckoning.
The difference between the old and the modern incarnation of this idea is simple: intent, organization, and extent. While we may do it individually today, the pioneers of this idea took it one step further. Instead of engaging in this as part of a disaffected, disconnected group of individuals, they organized a workplace and engaged on scale. They recognized that the lifeblood of capital is surplus value, and they effectively engaged in a surplus value strike until their demands were met.
This is not the only example of ‘striking on the job’, as it was called by the IWW, that has had a popular revival under another name. The subreddit r/maliciouscompliance documents people taking petty revenge or seeking small forms of justice by complying with onerous regulations to the letter.
This is strikingly similar to the approach taken by the French and Italian rail workers, observed by prominent IWW members Big Bill Haywood and Ben Williams during a tour of Europe in 1910. As Dubofsky writes in We Shall Be All:
“Sometimes, it was claimed, the workers could even effect sabotage through exceptional obedience: Williams and Haywood were fond of noting that Italian and French workers had on occasion tied up the national railroads simply by observing every operating rule in their work regulations.”
Haywood was also exposed to the idea of sabotage for the first time by French rail workers; not the explosive sabotage of popular imagination, but instead small surreptitious acts of non-compliance. Peter Carlson writes in Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood:
“Tired of waiting for parliament to act on their demands, railroad workers walked off their jobs all across the country. The French government responded by drafting the strikers into the army and then ordering them back to work. Undaunted, the workers carried their strike to the job. Suddenly, they could not seem to do anything right. Perishables sat for weeks, sidetracked and forgotten. Freight bound for Paris was misdirected to Lyon or Marseille instead. This tactic — the French called it “sabotage” — won the strikers their demands and impressed Bill Haywood.”
Again, the key takeaway is one of organization and scale. Individual employees risk facing repercussions for engaging in this form of wildcat industrial action, but as the old Wobbly song puts it:
“One by one they dared not say ‘the hours are much too long,’ but they can shout it now because they’re fifty thousand strong.”
To put it another way, one Amazon employee mislabeling packages is the employee’s problem; an entire warehouse shift misdirecting deliveries is Amazon’s problem.
In short, if you are quietly quitting you are not simply engaging in self care, or work-life balance, or setting healthy boundaries — important as those things might be. Rather, you are making the same observations and employing the same militant tactics as the labor heroes of yore.
If you notice that your colleagues are doing the same, maybe — carefully, quietly — talk to them about it. Quiet quitting has some chance of working when it happens at scale; if it is at scale and organized, it no longer has to be quiet.
Most importantly, recognize that when you leave work at 5pm sharp and ignore that email at 5:05, you are — in some small way — part of the same struggle as the striking Kellogg’s workers, or the Tasmanian nurses, or the Ohio teachers.
Recognize that when you sit on the toilet singing “Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime”, you are fighting the same fight as Mick Lynch and the UK rail workers.
And recognize that you are not alone — there are billions of workers and hundreds of years of history marching beside you in solidarity.
