‘Quiet Quitting’ — Not Just For the ‘Silly Season’
“More than half of these people were quantified as not engaged, 54%, which meant showing up pretty passively, doing their work and not much else,” said Wall Street Journal reporter Lindsay Ellis, in a podcast on her report about quiet quitting.
This discontent is not limited to America. In China, increasingly our global competitor, the term “tang ping,” literally meaning “lying flat,” has gone viral, according to various reports as reportedly exhausted young workers call for “lying flat” as an antidote to society’s pressures.
“Lying flat is my wise movement,” a user wrote in a since-deleted post on a discussion forum, BBC reported. “Only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things.”
Alas, that’s the sort of dilemma that many of my fellow African Americans would dismiss as “white people’s problems.”
“Black people aren’t talking about this because, for most people of color, ‘quiet quitting’ is simply not a choice,” writes Angela Johnson in The Root, pointing out that African Americans still have an unemployment rate that’s twice as high as for white Americans.
But while everyone has a different reaction, positively or negatively, to the sound of quiet quitting, it is important to remember what the idea of such passive resistance is all about. As Kathy Caprino, a women’s career coach, told CNN, “It’s about stopping doing work that people think is beyond what they were hired to do and not getting compensated for it.”
There’s nothing really new about that. Think of it as a recent twist to some very old logic. As Kahn put it, the “hustle culture” isn’t for everybody or every workplace. People want to be paid what they’re worth and they want to feel appreciated.
No wonder that much of “quiet quitting” is motivated by stresses, often from an imbalance between the employee’s work and their life outside of work. For those who feel that sort of stress, which can be particularly worrisome in one’s early career-building years, it’s important to set boundaries and not feel exploited by suddenly having more duties than your job description requires.
No, your worth as a person is not defined by your work, especially on your first job. But neither should your work pay back less than you’re worth.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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