Quiet quitting – Labour’s latest rebellion

First came the Great Resignation. Then there was the refusal to return to the office. Now comes working to rule aka ‘quiet quitting’

Photo by Eduardo Alexandre on Unsplash

If I were the kind of onanist given to promulgating eponymous laws, Bowen’s First Law would be: ‘Just about everything – workers’ employment prospects, employers’ hiring options, a single person’s dating possibilities, an individual’s migration opportunities, a young person’s accommodation choices, the ability of an entrepreneur to source capital, the tax regime of a particular nation, the price of a head of lettuce – comes down to supply and demand’.

The older I’ve gotten, the more the laws of supply and demand have become my go-to heuristic. Now, whenever I’m trying to understand a situation, I start by asking myself, “What is in limited or excess supply here?” Ask yourself that one simple question and things – the job market, the dating market, the housing market, black markets, supermarkets – start making sense.

Labour’s belated revenge

If I were sufficiently self-pleasuring to name two laws after myself, Bowen’s Second Law would be: ‘Market dynamics are omnipresent – and not only in market societies’.   

It’s my contention (and no longer just mine – please see below) that the balance of power has swung decisively from Capital to Labour over the last few years. Speaking of dating markets, Labour resembles the previously overweight woman who has slimmed down. Or the high-school nerd who founded a wildly successful start-up. After many years of being treated at best dismissively and at worst cruelly by the opposite sex, the newly attractive woman or recently successful man can’t quite believe the rules of the game have abruptly changed. Still, they are tentatively beginning to know their value and realise they have options that simply didn’t exist before.

As discussed in my previous Substack missives, first workers simply resigned from jobs they found unsatisfactory. It’s worth noting these workers weren’t so presumptuous as to imagine their existing employers would be amenable to improving their conditions. Many Great Resigners didn’t feel any future employer would offer them attractive conditions, which is why so many of them explored self-employment options. They just knew, possibly after being confronted with their mortality during a global pandemic, that they didn’t want to go on living lives of quiet desperation as powerless wage slaves.  

Of course, most workers didn’t resign their jobs during the pandemic. But when told they had to return to the old, pre-pandemic, way of doing things (i.e. at least 38 hours in a workplace, plus another 5-20 hours commuting to and fro from said workplace), in vast numbers they replied, “Fuck that for a game of soldiers,” much to the (impotent) fury of their superiors.  

And now comes ‘quiet quitting’, which in ye olden days meant (a) being a public servant, (b) being an unambitious employee working in the private sector, or (c) being a union member ‘working to rule’.

Quiet quitting 101

I’m not down with the kids and wasn’t aware of ‘quiet quitting’ until I started seeing references to it in news stories a week or two ago. From what the interwebs tells me, the quiet quitting movement went viral as a result of a TikTok video posted in late July by Zaid Khan, who is reportedly a 24-year-old engineer. In the video, in a soothing voice, Khan explains that quiet quitting involves “quitting the idea of going above and beyond at work” and that “you’re still performing your duties but no longer subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it’s not and your worth as a person is not defined by your labour”.   

I’ll leave weighing the pros and cons of quiet quitting to a future Substack missive. What I find most interesting about the phenomenon is employers’ reaction to it. In stark contrast to the barely concealed, or completely unconcealed, anger the officer class expressed between mid-2021 and mid-2022 when it became apparent the enlisted men and women wouldn’t be returning to their places of work, the response to ‘quiet quitting’ has been restrained and even understanding, at least in public.

In a recent SmartCompany article, a People and Culture manager observes:

“This idea of quiet quitting could be considered a subset of the Great Resignation as this concept speaks to that ongoing trend that has come out of COVID. Individuals are re-evaluating their priorities and their work is front and centre of that re-evaluation for the first time in many years.”

Does the HR maven advise managers to tell their underlings to get their noses out of their navels and get back to going above and beyond the call of duty immediately or risk being frogmarched out of the building by security? Not at all.

“The societal shifts we’re seeing with the Great Resignation/Reshuffle are indicators that employers need to have a good, hard look at their employee experience and how that is impacting their culture, and in turn their business performance.”

In the same way partners of beautiful women and successful men are expected to be grateful for their good fortune and go out of their way to appease their in-demand paramour, managers are now expected to ask what they’ve done wrong if there is any workplace unpleasantness.

“Have a curious, open conversation that you approach with good intentions. Once you understand the challenges an employee is facing, you can work together to intentionally design their work. Many things have changed, and there is a greater desire for flexibility, putting more boundaries between work and life, and shifting the mindset from living to work to working to live. Putting boundaries around work in place is essential to help prevent burnout in our people.”

(At this juncture, the journalist writing the article suggests initiatives such as “enforcing a strict finish time for staff, rolling out policy that bans after-hours emails, and insisting staff take their lunch breaks in full” might reduce the amount of quiet or outright quitting.)  

Then comes the money quote:

“The power dynamic between employer and employee has been out of balance for so long. After the realities of the past few years, the labour market is course correcting and coming back into alignment. Employees have realised that giving all of yourself to your job is no longer acceptable.”

Even I would be tempted to feel sorry for employers and their managerial henchmen and henchwomen at this point – if I wasn’t so aware of how appallingly so many employers and managers have treated their workers for the past four decades, when the “power dynamic” was slanted in their favour.

With reference to Bowen’s First Law, “power dynamic” really just means market dynamic. From circa 1975-2020, there were more workers than there was work available in many first-world nations, and both employers and employees acted accordingly. Now the worm has very much turned and both employers and employees are starting to act accordingly.        

Sweet vindication
Like the sun, or at least one of the minor planets, Ross Gittins has been a permanent fixture in my life. Granted, I wasn’t reading his columns when I was a child, but he was certainly writing them. (Back then he was preaching an austere economic rationalist orthodoxy; he subsequently mellowed in old age.)  

I can’t remember exactly when I became aware of Gittins. I think I may have started occasionally reading his columns when I began studying high-school economics back in the late 1980s. I’m sure I relied heavily on a guide he authored for high-school students when studying for the HSC and have been a regular reader ever since.

So, you may be able to imagine my delight when I clicked on a recent column of his – ‘Bosses take note: workers will soon have the upper hand’ – that was essentially a distillation of the 31 articles I’ve authored since I joined Substack in mid-January.

Here is the money quote from that article:

“Short-term factors are hiding deeper, longer-term trends that have brought us to a turning point. We’re going from never having enough jobs available for people to fill, to never having enough people available to fill all the jobs.

And here’s the bonus: if I’m right, we’ll be going from insecure jobs and stagnant wages to much higher wages and bosses falling over themselves to attract and retain the workers they need.

Business people are nothing if not opportunistic. When workers are plentiful, they pick and choose and make demands. But when workers are hard to find, they become wonderful people whose only concern is their workers’ welfare.

The first factor that’s working to turn the tables is the ageing of the population: more oldies leaving the workforce than youngsters joining it. Fertility has fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1 kids per couple.

For many years we’ve sought to slow population ageing by maintaining one of the advanced economies’ highest rates of immigration, with an emphasis on young, skilled workers.

Skilled immigration is also used to keep downward pressure on wage rates. With the pandemic receding, big business is desperate for high immigration to resume ASAP. And the Albanese government is likely to oblige.

But setting high immigration targets is one thing; attaining them is another. These days, migrants come mainly from developing countries. But all the other rich countries have an ageing problem, so we’ll be competing against them for takers.

China’s population is also ageing rapidly. Our intake of foreign students – some of whom are allowed to stay on – has been reduced by our falling out with China, but has always been a temporary play while Asia’s emerging economies get their universities going…

Have you noticed all the stories lately about shortages of teachers, GPs, hospital workers and, before that, aged care and childcare workers? We’re going to get them all from overseas? I doubt it.

I noticed a tweet from an economics professor: “‘skill shortage’ = wages too low to attract workers”.

Get it? If we want all these people, we’ll have to pay them a lot more than we do now – and treat them a lot better.

As I’ve written about previously, I was part of generation that emerged into the workforce when the official youth unemployment rate was around 30 per cent. I eventually broke into an industry that, even back then, had a churn-and-burn business model that involved hiring lots of young people and paying them little more than subsistence wages while dangling the carrot of a well-paid and possibly high-profile and glamorous role down the track. Needless to say, that highly paid and prestigious role never materialised for many media workers, especially once Google and Facebook began hoovering up all the advertising dollars.*   

I suspect the power dynamic (i.e. the market dynamic) will continue to skew in employers’ favour in a handful of glamour industries, such as journalism, fashion, show business and high-end hospitality. But workers in pretty much every other industry already hold the whip hand, or very soon will do. They shouldn’t hesitate to exercise their newfound power as ruthlessly as their bosses once did.  

*Half a decade ago, a Vice senior manager ‘joked’ about the company’s ‘22’ rule: hire 22-year-olds, pay them $22,000 and make them work 22 hours a day. I’d be willing to bet $22,000 that very few of the 22-year-olds employed by Vice in 2017 are now well-renumerated 27-year-old journalists. Most of them are probably no longer working in the media at all. Yet Vice founder Shane Smith is a billionaire. I’m guessing it’s been a long time since he put in a 22-hour day.