Quiet Quitting and the Future of Labor Power
Thoughts on our inability to make consistent, ordered choices.
1.
First off, I have to ask: what the fuck is quiet quitting?
OK, I’m being facetious. I get what quiet quitting is and I even kind of understand why it might be a thing. But still, quiet quitting doesn't quite make a lot of sense in the context of the contemporary bureaucratic workplace.
Every office job I’ve ever had worked the same way. I showed up on the first day and went through some kind of on-boarding. Someone took me to my desk and showed me around the office. I went through an orientation, either in person or virtual. And at some point in the first few weeks, I sat down with my front-line manager and talked about exactly what I’d be doing.
This process of delineating work duties always had a formal component. Every year, we sat down and outlined what I was expected to accomplish and at the end of every year, we sat down again and went over whether I had met expectations or not.
What does it mean to quiet quit in that context? Doing the job that you were hired to do is not quitting. It’s the opposite of quitting. That said, as tempted as I am to dismiss this as just another nonsense trend story, I do think that there's more going on here.1
Lately, I’m in the habit of perusing r/antiwork, the sub-reddit that advocates “unemployment for all, not just the rich”. It’s an interesting place. It’s anti-capitalist, but not really socialist. I’m not even sure that it’s particularly political. It’s mostly people complaining about their horrible bosses, which is a new perspective for me. Most of my bosses have been pretty great.
I have had not-great managers, but this means something different in the so-called “professional” jobs.2 The winning formula for a professional services firm is to find the best people, give them what they need, and let them do what they do. These companies invest a lot of resources into attracting, on-boarding and developing employees, so any manager who drives people away probably won’t be rewarded for it. Of course, it’s not always this way.
Plenty of workplaces operate under a different model, where the incentive is for management to grind as much work out of employees while giving them as little in return as possible. R/antiwork helps to fill a hole in my understanding of that world. However, as much sympathy as I have for those stuck in dead-end jobs, working for horrible bosses, I can’t help but notice the fundamental irrationality of many of the complaints. The things people complain about in one post are so often conflicting with what people are complaining about in another context.3
There is a common claim that economists are clueless because classical economics assumes people are rational. The claim is that once you fix for that error, economic models stop making any sense. Behavioral economics was supposed to provide a solution for this but it turns out a lot of the psychology that underpins behavioral economics doesn’t replicate very well. I am agnostic on the question of whether human beings are really rational or not, but it’s worth noting that economic rationality has a specific meaning. Economic rationality is the ability to hold consistent and ordered preferences, and not really about whether those preferences are good or bad.
I tend to default to the maxim that all economic models are false but some are useful. Of course, that utility depends on the extent that people’s behavior is economically rational. This is where I get concerned, because I am beginning to wonder if we aren’t getting more and more unable to hold consistent and ordered preferences.
It’s this seemingly increasing irrationality that interests me.
2.
r/antiwork has a perspective that I don’t find in many other places. When media covers labor issues, they tend to default to a certain political/ideological narrative. Sometimes it’s management vs employees. Sometimes it’s the 1% vs the 99%. If it’s conservative media, the narrative becomes left-wing agitators vs hard-working decent Americans. All that’s fine, if it’s your thing, but I’d rather just hear people bitch and moan about their horrible bosses and ass-backwards management. A place like r/antiwork puts muscle and sinew onto the vague bones of media narratives.
The recent efforts to unionize Amazon warehouse workers is a good example of how media coverage fails. The narrative was “Amazon management vs workers” and yet, I almost never heard directly from the workers. This Wired article is a good example. The headline reads “Amazon Workers Lose Another Union Vote as Management Digs In,” and the story goes on to tell of the 406 to 206 vote against organizing under the Amazon Labor Union.
The Wired article extensively quotes the lead organizer of the campaign, as well as an Amazon spokesperson, but the voice of the workers themselves is nowhere to be found. All the other articles I’ve read on the Amazon unionizing efforts are the same. They quote union reps and labor experts, which is fine for context, but without hearing directly from workers, it’s almost impossible to understand why only one of the several votes held at Amazon warehouses has resulted in a union victory. Of course, once you’ve accepted the “management vs employees” narrative, there’s not much more to understand. The story is simply that workers lost and management won.
I won’t say that this narrative is wrong. I can’t say it’s wrong because it’s almost completely tautological. If you accept the framing that unionization is de facto in the best interests of workers, then the only reason why workers would fail to vote in favor of the union is either they don’t know their best interests or management was able to pull a fast one. Within that framing, you can’t suggest that workers voted against the union because they thought it wasn’t in their best interests, which I think is why most journalists never bothered to speak directly to the workers. It might disrupt the narrative.
I don’t doubt the ability of management to create a difficult organizing environment. I don’t even doubt that management would engage in outright suppression. But the vote wasn’t even close, so maybe it was something else. For example, maybe the union was selling some broad slate of progressive causes, while workers just wanted concrete, discrete improvements in their working conditions. And when Amazon offered them higher pay and more benefits, most of the workers decided to take it. This explanation doesn’t make any sense if you remain at the level of broad class analysis, but I’m here to suggest that this kind of broad class analysis often leads to the kind of irrationality that I mentioned above.4
Amazon aside, there is a larger disconnect between the discrete demands for better working conditions and compensation and the larger ideological debates that consume us. What’s more, this conflict has always been at the heart of the labor movement, which developed alongside the socialist movement. There has always been a split between those who wished to use the power of labor to further the cause of revolution and those who were focused on improving the lives of workers within the existing framework.5
I know I’m being circuitous here, but maybe you see where I’m going. Many of the folks who currently advocate on behalf of labor come from a paradigm of anti-capitalism. If you buy into this paradigm, there’s no difference between advocating for better conditions and higher pay and advocating for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. But in reality, you simply cannot maximize both at the same time. You have to prioritize.
Far from wanting to “smash capitalism,” the U.S. labor movement has long understood that the fortunes of workers were inextricably linked to the fortunes of business. By the way, it’s cool if smashing capitalism is your priority. Just understand that the median worker is much more focused on their pay, benefits and working conditions, which might explain the outcomes of the Amazon unionization votes.
3.
I apologize for both burying the lede and taking the long tangent in the second section. My main point here is that understanding and respecting the value of work is key to advocating on behalf of workers. While the revolutionaries and the reformers advocated for different paths, at the heart of both was a fundamental belief in the value and dignity of work.
For the labor movement to be successful, unions are going to have to decide to what extent they are collective bargaining units and to what extent they are political organizations. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but there is a tension that ought to be recognized. The more you focus on one, the farther you are from the other. To put it another way, our actions have consequences and if you want to prioritize a specific set of outcomes, then you need to prioritize the actions that get you there. This is what it means to have consistent and ordered preferences. This is what it means to be economically rational.
I started this essay with a discussion of quiet quitting, because, quite frankly, I don’t think quiet quitting is a very useful thing to do. It neuters the value of your work. It’s passive. It’s exactly the kind of non-solution you get in a society where people have stopped making difficult choices and where acquiescence to internet memes has become confused with meaningful action.
This is my issue with r/antiwork. In denigrating work, we deprive ourselves of our biggest bargaining chip. (For now. AI may change all of this.) All of our power as an employee ultimately comes down to whether or not we’re willing to walk out. We can quit as individuals or walk out as part of a collective bargaining unit, but the decision to withhold your labor is where almost all of your negotiating power lies. Quiet quitting denudes that power.
I’m not saying that you need to be giving “110%” at work. There’s nothing wrong with doing the job that you were hired to do to the standards at which you were hired to do it. There’s also nothing wrong with exceeding the standards because you want to get better at your job or you’re looking to be recognized for promotion. And there’s also nothing wrong with occupying a seat for a paycheck while you work on some passion on the side. All of that is fine, but for god’s sake, pick one. You can’t do all three at the same time.
I've used the example of work, but in almost every area of contemporary American life, we face a similar set of tradeoffs: housing, education, immigration, healthcare. In all of these areas, there is a fundamental optimization problem that has to be addressed. Facing up to these problems will mean demonstrating a modicum of economic rationality. Every moment we spend putting that off, the more will break down around us. That won’t end well.
It makes even more sense when you consider analogous phrases from other cultures, such as “lying flat” in China or Japan’s “herbivore men.”
I have worked plenty of non-professional jobs. I’ve waited tables and worked in fast food. I spent four years as a lower enlisted soldier in the army. However, these were all situations I knew would be temporary.
One example that comes to mind is seeing complaints about lack of work contracts in the US and then seeing people complain about having to serve out the remainder of their contract after giving notice.
Here is the Amazon Labor Union constitution. You can decide for yourself to what extent this might or might not be appealing to workers.
This split is perhaps most evident in the differences between the International Workers of the World, or Wobblies, who advocated for one big union that would unite the working class and eventually overthrow the capitalist class, and Samuel Gompers’ American Federation of Labor, which eschewed revolutionary politics in favor of a determined focus on improving working conditions and pay.
Nice post JR. I think you are putting your finger on what is, at least in my opinion, challenging the country right now, in toto. The idea that you can have everything, all the time, seems to be coming to the fore. But the reality, as you put it, is that you need to pick one thing and work on it. Also, other people might not want to do what you think is essential. If you aren't willing to look at the world through their eyes, you will miss this, the reasoning behind it. And, yes, there is reasoning there.
Anyway, doing time in the trenches, so to speak, can only help you if you spend that time learning why trenches were dug.