‘Quiet quitting?’ Everything about this so-called trend is nonsense

theguardian.com:

When Kim Kardashian said it seems like no one wants to work any more, she hit a raw nerve. That’s because people are working. And for the last several years we’ve had to work through a deadly pandemic, a bad economy, the decimation of our civil liberties and the slow collapse of democracy.

What is happening is that tired, overworked, burnt-out working-class people are taking back their agency and refusing jobs and working conditions that are unsuitable for us.

The latest of these acts of resistance is so-called “quiet quitting”: the newly coined term for when workers only do the job that they’re being paid to do, without taking on any extra duties, or participating in extracurriculars at work.

Gaining popularity in response to pandemic-induced burnout, quiet quitting is definitely having a moment; especially among young people who, in many ways, have suffered through the worst of these surreal times.

And this is all great, except “quiet quitting” isn’t a thing … at least it shouldn’t be. The notion of quiet quitting suggests a norm where people have to perform extra, often undesirable tasks outside of their job description, and where not doing that additional work is considered a form of “quitting” your job.

Forcing employees to do this extra, unpaid work is wrong, but the debate around “quiet quitting” also raises important questions about who is actually doing much of this unpaid labor. Women, for example, are disproportionately asked and expected to take on work that no one else wants to do, like planning the office party, attending to that time-consuming client, keeping track of employee birthdays and so on, according to the book The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work. On the other hand, “it’s very easy for