American business leaders sometimes talk about workforce productivity trends the same strained way you might expect a perfectly healthy hypochondriac to check his body temperature three times a day. (Remember “nobody wants to work anymore”? The U.S. unemployment rate is 3.5%.) The new social media meme about “quiet quitting” — not actually quitting, but doing the bare minimum at your job — is the latest vascular twinge to send CEOs back to the carpet with two fingers to the neck, checking for skipped heartbeats.
“Quiet quitting clearly entered our work conversation, but here’s why we need to keep it out of our work lives,” famous boss Arianna Huffington, chief executive of Thrive Global, fretted in a LinkedIn essay last week. “Quiet quitting isn’t just about quitting on a job, it’s a step toward quitting on life.”
But once you exit the leather sofa inside LinkedIn’s glass office and stop by the open-plan bullpen of TikTok, it’s clear that the rank-and-file is quite open to the idea of a lighter workload. In a series of skits by user Sarai Marie that has accumulated more than 1 million likes, a character named Veronica plays out “quiet quitting.” “OK let’s see, goal for today — 500 calls?! We’re doing 50,” the character says, later telling a boss: “Respectfully, Susan, it’s 2022; we’re acting our wage, so don’t give me extra work.” She clocks out at precisely 5 p.m.
Anti-work sketch comedy on TikTok has become something like the sea shanty of the Zoom era. It’s a communal art form by and for an increasingly self-confident workforce, which knows it’s gotten an unusual upper hand on employers due to the historically tight labor markets of the late Trump and early Biden administration years.