The information in this article may seem a little outdated. It's a repost of an older article on the “quiet quitting” phenomenon. But I figured since multiple news outlets were reporting on the all-new, totally unique “quiet vacationing” now was a good time to revisit this one

Enjoy!

-Matt Starr, editor-in-chief of The Serving Times

I'm going to take a big leap here and assume you’re tired of hearing about quiet quitting [wanking motion]. For months it seems that all Insider, Forbes, WSJ, Bloomberg Business, et al. have been able to talk about is this newfangled trend that kicked off on TikTok earlier this year.

But what if I told you that quiet quitting wasn’t some new concept? And by “told you” I mean “confirmed what you already knew”. Well I’m writing this to let you know all this talk of “quiet quitting” is just another sabotage….

The Part Where I Get Pissy About Business News Media

Quiet quitting originates from, at least according to news site and satire material source Business Insider, a Business Insider article (go figure) from March 2022 titled “‘My company is not my family’: Fed up with long hours, many employees have quietly decided to take it easy at work rather than quit their jobs’ by Ali Ito. And yes, that’s just the title, not the full article.

In the article, Ito tells the story of Justin, a job recruiter who is so fed up with his job he works fewer and fewer hours and does less and less work. At least that’s what I imagine it’s about as it’s locked behind a paywall. This is where the concept of only doing as much work as you’re paid for and never going above and beyond became “quiet quitting”.

After the article dropped the quiet quitting trend blew up on TikTok due to how popular Business Insider is on the app. Again, this is according to Insider. As they claim, TikTok users read the article and started emulating it. So weird flex for Business Insider to take credit for ruining a generation of workers, but that’s what they say happened.

Since business news media often have nothing of value to post and like to treat TikTok trends as actual news, they all covered quiet quitting like flies on shit in the most appropriate metaphor I’ve ever written.

Nowadays you can’t log onto social media without seeing several articles that mention the phenomenon. I’m picking on Insider because, well, fuck them, but Business Insider seems to post at least six of those articles a day. I was actually exaggerating there, but I just checked and they literally posted one WHILE I WAS WRITING THIS!

Okay, so that’s the history of quiet quitting. At least, the history of the term quiet quitting. Look into any social media community or group centered around workers and most will agree this is some bullshit. Most prefer the term “acting your wage” (and get ready, because business news media just caught on to that one too).

As you already know because you’re not a Business Insider bootlicker (I hope), this behavior is nothing new. But how exactly not new is it? Well, put on your wooden shoes and come back in time with me, because I’m telling all y’all, it’s a sabotage.

The Part Where History Comes Alive!

Sabotage by French anarcho-communist and vice-secretary of the General Confederation of Labour Émile Pouget was published in 1912. In it, he discusses methods of dealing with employers who expect exemplary effort at lackluster wages, including the titular sabotage. You can read the work in its entirety on The Anarchist Library.

We now know sabotage by its modern definition, which implies military tampering and espionage. But this was not the case when the term was coined by Pouget in the late 1800s.

The word itself is derived from “sabot”, a wooden shoe known to be worn by peasants. While differing accounts suggest conflicting reasons as to what a wooden shoe has to do with the act of sabotage, Pouget describes the practice as working as though you’re getting the fuck beaten out of you by wooden fuckin’ shoes (my paraphrasing, not an exact quote). Personally, I’d have gone with “clogging the spigot of production”, but my puns nether land.

Here’s where shit starts to sound familiar….

In this work, Pouget evokes the concept of ca’canny, or “go cannie”, a Scottish term literally meaning to slow down, which was a labor practice used throughout the United Kingdom to deal with employers who refused to pay a fair wage where workers only did as much work as they felt they’d been compensated for.

Here, Pouget quotes a pamphlet he credits as popularizing the ca’canny practice:

“If you want to buy a hat worth $2.00 you must pay $2.00. If you want to spend only $1.50 you must be satisfied with an inferior quality. A hat is a commodity. If you want to buy half a dozen of shirts at fifty cents each you must pay $3.00. If you want to spend only $2.50 you can only have five shirts.

“Now the bosses declare that labour and skill are nothing but commodities, like hats and shirts.”

It goes on to say that workers should take employers at their word and only give as much effort as the employer has paid for. Pouget refers to this formula as “bad wages, bad labour” and, lacking a word for it in his native French, dubbed the tactic “sabotage” after the wooden shoe thing.

So far I can’t find a single source that says Pouget wrote for or interviewed with Business Insider when he coined this term.

The Part Where It All Comes Full Circle

So obviously, Pouget’s work isn’t the only example of quiet quitting, sabotage, ca’canny, or whatever the hell you wanna call it from throughout the ages. Pouget’s Sabotage itself cites several other examples. It’s worth a skim.

There are also more modern examples of work slowdowns. One as recent as 2015 when the New York City police union called for officers to make fewer arrests, generally blow off their duties, and stop giving a fuck. For some reason we don’t call that one “quiet quitting “. Also, it actually made New York safer, but we’re not going to unpack that.

So did Justin, the supposed job recruiter supposedly interviewed by the supposed news site Business Insider, read the work of Pouget or study other labor slowdowns throughout history and act accordingly? You fucking know he didn’t, what a stupid question, are you an idiot or something?

No, because in reality the slowing down of work to meet the expectations of our job requirements as presented by our employers is something people have always done. Not only is it one of the only tools we have to effect change in the workplace but also something unmotivated people just kind of do. I’m sorry, if I have no reason to go “above and beyond” why should I?

So what is “quiet quitting” then anyway? Well as we push well past then thousandth word of this essay, I’ll tell you, but you probably already know.

It’s a buzzword. It’s meaningless word slop. It’s a mouthful of alphabet soup spit into the face of workers. It’s clickbait ammo aimed at getting you to buy a subscription, see an ad, or share an article.

There is no new fad of workers slowing down or being less productive, and all of us who actually work in actual workplaces know it. In short, Business Insider, Forbes, WSJ, Bloomberg Business, et al. are all full of shit and we all know it.

But, of course, it doesn’t matter that we know it. We’re not the target audience. No, they’re looking to catch the eyeballs of managers and executives. I mean, god forbid the people actually inside the business get something out of Business Insider.

In the end, taking trends of what workers say on TikTok and other social media and manufacturing clickbaity buzzwords for corporate moral panic is just another exploitation of workers. It’s another way to take our struggle and turn it against us. And while they’re currently declaring the quiet quitting “era” to be over, an era they claim to have started, it’s only a matter of time before they’re on to the next stupid thing we’re all going to be pissed about.

I’m sorry to say it, but as long as the articles get clicks there’s no stopping it. Quiet quitting, not to mention The Great Resignation, is the “fentanyl in the candy” of the business news world. The best we can do is call it out when we see it and not click the links.

Another important thing that I feel needs to be addressed separately is that we should look into their claims before we react. Last month an article about how workers are motivated by pizza and not money started circulating. The smallest of efforts led me to find that the study being cited was complete bullshit, but social media threw an epic shitfit anyway without ever scratching that surface

In short, you can’t call them on their bullshit if you don’t know how their claim is bullshit to begin with. Simply saying “that’s bullshit!” isn’t enough. And I promise you, it’s almost always entirely bullshit.

And to the business “news” sites themselves: Please, for the sake of workers everywhere, stop being such dipshits and cut this shit out. Please.