The labor shortage is here for one reason–and it's quiet quitting
fortune.com
fortune.com
> “It’s actually young people, 25 to 45, who used to work very long hours, who are now cutting back,” he said, noting, “it’s all men—not women. "
Is it really fair to call that "quiet quitting"?
It's origin is quite clear: disillusioned employees don't quit their job, but instead do the bare minimum needed to not get fired.
Now it apparently means anything from that to people who still work very hard and sometimes do overtime, but aren't willingly working weekends and 50 hour overtimes just to please their corporate overlords anymore.
That's not how I understood it so maybe it isn't that clear. My understanding was that it was doing the work you were contracted to do. So if you were salaried to work 40 hours a week then you wouldn't do 50 or read your emails at home.
Hence the new term.
Sometimes that has a race or class component but I think it most often is simply that it conveniently shifts the blame for poor performance. That project didn’t fail because incompetent managers confused Accenture’s suits with competence, or because the management layers are only good at playing politics, but because the staff “quiet quit” (i.e. spent their unpaid time with their friends and families rather than gifting it to their boss).
The United States has a lot of people who either are in management or self-identify with the people at the top so a business writer can have a very easy career writing “it’s not you, it’s them” pieces like this. Our retirement system also means you have a large audience of people who have spare time, depend on stock market returns for their income, and are thus far more willing to think other people should have harsher working conditions than they personally did.
Given that middle class real wages haven't increased much in about half a century while housing and education have, it's hard to conclude that hard work is going to deliver much in the way of reward (I've noticed that people who say that hard work is in itself a reward don't seem to be into cleaning their own toilets). I've personally seen it affect nearly everyone in my life from my Boomer parents who used to have an unbreakable work ethic now turned to cynicism after enough time working for private equity owned companies to colleagues who are beginning to grasp just how steep the wealth pyramid they seek to scale is.
It's a system designed to generate misery for all but those at the very top, and even they seem pretty unhappy with the situation. I think only the psychopaths are really content (if that's what they're capable of feeling; I'm unsure of their internal lives having known a few).
a) give up
b) try to rise above the chaff
Giving up in a country with very few social nets is bad for one’s health…
I'd say the problem with b is that there are lots of ways to rise above the chaff - you can sell NFTs or some other MLM/scam or resort to more outright crimes; without any morals you can extract as much value from society as you wish and it seems like no one will stop you; see my above comment regarding private equity.
It seems you've missed at least one option and that is the so called "quiet quitting" that the article is about, though I suppose you could file that under giving up, I see it more as playing the game just enough to get by.
Like, "we just hired this 100k engineer, but is he really just doing 50k work?"