Can someone tell me how this is actually a fucking conversation that has reached the mainstream
It's classic top down business media propaganda. Make up a term that pathologizes a completely normal attitude (not wanting to do extra work for free), push out to the article purveyor class who write 1,000 op-eds on the topic, "hard news" media reports "there's this thing that everyone is talking about". All of a sudden your boss is holding meetings to address this very serious made-up problem.
bullseye. this is the most astroturfed bullshit I’ve ever heard.
What’s next, they're going to coin the term ‘forever shitting’?
‘Ive heard about this new zoomer trend on the tiktok that challenges people to shit forever, from here on out anyone spending more than 5 minutes on the toilet has minutes counted towards their lunch break’
What’s next, they’re going to coin the term ‘forever shitting’?
IBS gang rise up
Saw an article the other day on "quiet firing" describing refusing raises/promotions, giving bad feedback or nebulous/confusing project priorities, or otherwise making employees miserable to get them to quit. Which is funny because I always thought there was a term for that and it was "workplace harassment."
I had that kind of shit happen to me and frankly it's fucked me up even years later. Starting a new job I'm absolutely paranoid that I'm going to get yelled at for mistakes that frankly aren't my fault because I've been relatively poorly trained but in the past I was fucked by heavy disciplinary action. Frankly it's bizarre hearing people give me positive feedback and say I'm good at my job to the point I swear they're just lying and trying to set me up because I only ever got negative feedback, point out every single flaw I make rather than tell me the mistakes but also how I've been doing well.
Instead though I just doubled down and tried to keep my head down so I could get my magical one year of experience that would open up other opportunities outside the company and also let me transfer off the unit I was on, I got fired right at that one year mark. I regret not quitting and going elsewhere because honestly the harassment from my boss on a regular basis was fucking awful. I got an update from an old coworker that had connections left on the unit, nobody I knew while working there is left pretty much, the boss is still there obviously, but even one of the assistant managers had enough and screamed at her and walked off the unit one day. Frankly it's unbelievable that she's still the boss after such horrible staff turnover but that's protecting class interests through management I guess.
been reading this term and going :jesse-wtf:
:same-picture: "quiet quitting" is just wildcat slowdowns. if that, maybe something as simple as minimum-wage-minimum-effort. why does 'the discourse' need a fucking neologism for a millennia old tradition of the working class?
getting a big mallet labelled 'there's nothing new under the sun' and beating columnists to death with it
“quiet quitting” is just wildcat slowdowns.
Is it even that much? Or is it simply the consequence of an aging, burned out populace with fewer and fewer people contributing to the material benefit of society? Is it that nobody wants to work, or are we underpaying service/retail/manufacturing/shipping such that the preponderance of people have moved over to the FIRE sector to facilitate speculation?
It would be nice if we had some subliminal labor action going on. But I think a lot of this really is just The Invisible Hand ushering everyone over to where the money's actually at. I know more than a few people who quit otherwise-lucrative STEM careers to becoming real estate agents and they're rolling in it now. I know a few people who made their nut when their companies went public and retired in their 30s, thanks to the magic of the financial sector. By comparison, the folks who went the trade school route still aren't outpacing inflation, despite demand for plumbers and electricians and class A truckers being at an all-time high.
why does ‘the discourse’ need a fucking neologism for a millennia old tradition of the working class?
Because its easier to blame The Help for an economic downturn than to acknowledge that there's no fucking money in Helping and everyone knows it.
“Wildcat slowdowns” would be an organized action by a collective of workers. This is just bourgeois idealism and getting the workers to quit voluntarily and create a reserve army of labor because unemployment was too low (or to act in such a way they can easily be fired). Quitting without any organized mass action is the opposite of a working class action, it’s voluntarily assisting the bourgeois class interests instead of your own and replacing working class mass organizing with individual purity seeking.
Just doing less work at your job is fine, but don’t pretend it’s revolutionary activity unless it’s organized and coordinated as a tactic. If you get fired for “time theft”, they don’t have to pay you severance or unemployment. If you quit, they don’t have to pay you severance or unemployment.
This is why union organizers always tell those unionizers to keep working and do a good job at their work while they are organizing, because the corporation is looking for any excuse to fire you and you need to be unimpeachable.
So instead of being lazy and then getting fired, which is an ideal situation for bourgeoise that want to cool down the labor market without having to do lay-offs - instead do your job competently and organize your coworkers to fight for better wages
its just my impression of what it is by its use in a few articles i skimmed. the columnist class makes it out like its some kid of 'movement', but a) it probably isn't and b) they're not encouraging it, they're condemning it.
well, and worse than that they're inserting it into every possible subject to fan engagement & 'discourse'. starting to get quite :stop-posting-amogus: even though i only bothered to investigate the term today lol
It isn’t a real “movement” but they are trying to make it one, a fad anyway.
They are “condemning it” like they “condemned” anti-work, because the columnist class knows they are reviled by working class people and they know that some can be tricked with reverse psychology if they create a narrative that “oh no don’t get fired on purpose, the bourgeois would really hate that if you did that”. It’s currently just an intriguing peculiarity to columnists right now because it isn’t a legitimately threatening mass labor movement.
Once a legitimately threatening mass labor movement happens you will see what it really looks like when the media hates something, and it won’t be trying to will it into existence - it will be ignoring it, slandering it & spinning it into an evil Russian/Chinese fifth column
this is a very minor disagreement i shouldn't have used 'wildcat' so you didn't get the impression i thought quiet quitting was a form of activism. i was trying to inflect the less organized nature of wildcat than unadjectived slowdown, which also implies a level of organization . maybe 'disorganized' or 'individual' would've been better. point was that we have existing labor vocabulary for things being trotted out as new, pathologized and propagandized
Eh, I think it’s an active effort to muddy the water for what the population considers labor activism, in an attempt to pre-empt labor activism they know might be coming and steer it down a harmless route. I don’t think this type of individualist “activism” should be encouraged at all, and any workers participating in this type of strategy should change tactics to the tried and true proven methods of militant labor organization.
Looking back to around 50 years ago and you can see an example in some labor folk music about how the papers will sell anything as bad.
Individualist “anti-work” attitudes and disorganized quitting actually is bad. It’s idealist and leads nowhere.
...It's a song about 50000 lumberjacks going on strike?
I know, and that’s based and good. That’s militant labor organization right there, and what I am saying is the actual path forward.
I’m criticizing anyone who thinks “anti-work” or “quiet quitting” movements have any value whatsoever. These are oppositional to militant organizing. You can’t organize and strike if you just quit alone.
Communists are not opposed to “work”. We instead support the interests of workers, which includes continued employment.
Oh of course. I sorta have some nostalgia for the /r/antiwork subreddit because when I saw it like in 2016 because it was more ideologically leftist and a super niche subreddit which sorta helped me in my radicalization but back when that mod went and did that interview I remember going to the subreddit once again to find people upset that their "movement" had been destroyed when it was a place a bunch of people went to complain about their shitty work conditions and other people would try to get them to buy into crypto to "stop working."
I wanted to become a nurse because I wanted to put good into the world, in reality I"m just lining the pockets of the executive suites while they exploit my desire to try to help people and overwork me. In a just society I would have a safe patient load and be able to provide the highest quality care possible because it's not about profits but instead about just improving health and helping people.
The issue with the anti-work subreddit was two-fold. First, it claimed to be a movement and a solution. If it just claimed to be a place to shitpost and gripe about work, that sort of thing than it wouldn’t really be an issue just another lefty online space. The problem was the advice they were given was things like “quit your job” which is terrible advice for most working people, and they convinced the more naive among their ranks that they were participating in a political mass movement or labor organizing (while they were doing no such thing, you can’t organize if you quit alone).
Second, even though it was ideologically leftist it was very utopian and idealist and individualist in its outlook, which allowed the cryptobros and petty bourgeois an in (don’t like being a wagie in your cagie? Have you heard about passive income or owning a business and being your own boss?). Its branding is terrible, makes it seem infantile. “Anti-work” is only a viable position in a post-scarcity world with relative equality. We live in a capitalist imperialist world with sharp inequality, and work still needs to get done to keep society functioning. When 1st world workers shirk their work, either things will start to break down for society as a whole or 3rd word workers will have to pick up the slack. It starts to seem like their ultimate aim is merely the redistribution of wealth and labor within the imperialist core, social imperialism. Otherwise their position is incoherent and impossibly utopian given our current world.
Radlibs just want a shortcut to the hard work of labor organizing. There are no short cuts. There are no tricks to create utopia the capitalists don’t want you to know. We should not be “anti-work” we should be pro-worker, and that distinction is important. Full employment is a worker demand.
Because gig companies are actually needing to support themselves of labor surplus of their workers now.
The bourgeois need a reason for productivity to be down that doesn't mention 1 million dead and more disabled from COVID, so they're clutching at straws.
fake shit the ruling class cares about gets to be a weeks long cultural conversation but all the mass death, eviction, disease, doesnt get a peep.
I agree with other comments that it's business propaganda, but imo the reason it got large appeal and has staying power is that it coincidentally is very good at chasing clicks. I think most of the reactions to this trend have been negative, it does make people, even people who buy into corporate propaganda angry. Like whether you agree or disagree with it happening it makes you angry, if you think yourself as hard working but feel this is somehow overly judgemental it also makes you angry. It's the perfect bait for hate clicks.
omg pls shut the fuck up about quiet quitting i’m begging you fucking snitches
This is just a dumber version of the "Time Theft" discourse.
Honestly. If I'm on the clock and the manager hasn't given me a task that's not my fucking problem.
Capitalists are trying to convince us to voluntarily quit or opt-into getting fired and create a reserve army of labor since the labor market is overheating (wages are too competitive, unemployment is too low). This is an op, tricking workers into harming their own class interest and personal interest so that the bourgeois don’t need to do as many lay-offs and pay as much severance/unemployment insurance. “Anti-work” was the same thing, bourgeois idealism pushing people away from labor organizing while we have leverage, and into solo adventurist acts of epic disobedience that gets us fired for nothing.
Antiwork wasn't an op but fintech shitheads successfully damaged it after the atrocious interview that mod did and neoliberals then managed to infiltrate it to dilute the team and fuck up any possibility of it becoming something powerful for pushing organising among the left. The attack to undermine it was very much an op and a successful one at that.
It never had any potential because it was “anti-work” instead of pro-worker and was an individualist liberal spin on worker activism - one doomed to failure from the very outset. It’s embarrassing collapse is the natural outcome of the tenets at its core, it merely flowered into what the seed always contained.
A subreddit is not a mass movement, and it is not democratic - and it is easy to grift, steer and co-opt. Did the “movement” of anti-work select their representatives and spokespeople? No, it was just some random redditor power mod who was in the right place at the right time. This is not how real militant labor can happen, there was a 0% chance of this ever working
You are dismissing these things too hard.
None of this needs to be perfect to be an event that comes out in our benefit. Our goal is a marxist revolution and achieving that goal is essentially a series of pre-conditions that must be met.
These kinds of events won't bring about the marxist revolution but they can contribute to achieving various pre-conditions that must be met. Whether it is marxist or not it represents a fight between those unhappy with the state of things battling with the powers that be over their unhappiness. It is very fertile ground to agitate and educate in, to raise class consciousness and have people fail in their battle to move them on to new options.
The path from random perfectly normal person to a person willing to die in revolution is a series of battles with the existing state of things that hardens and hardens a person. Our job is to recognise when those battles are happening and to pull on the strings to make the outcome fall slightly more in our favour than it would have without our participation and pull. Ride each and every event until the eventual fully marxist radicalisation that occurs. Both online and offline.
I don't think you understand what I am saying. I don't think this is just merely an ill advised poor form of praxis, I believe this is actively encouraged by liberal ideology specifically because it's toothless and anti-worker
I agree with you that the bourgeoisie push inherently harmless things (to capitalism) as a replacement to stop people turning marxist. This is not the case with antiwork though and it's backed up by what happened with it.
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Goldman Sachs named it directly as part of the cause of America's labour problems
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he media immediately took an interesting in cutting off its head. And found the narcissistic top moderator who wanted fame to be a willing idiot. This led to the interview.
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Fintech assholes seized the opportunity following this to grab influence over large portions of the community, starting their exodus community which focuses solely on social-democracy.
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At the same time neoliberals took advantage of the chaos within the team and the subreddit to get compradors onto the team. Ever since then a slow and steady takeover of the internal team has occurred with multiple internal drama events shaking up the team and allowing neoliberals to rise higher and higher in the hierarchy, they now practically control it.
Antiwork was kneecapped with a baseball bat by these bourgeoise shitbags because it was genuinely helping the left.
You can talk about "liberal ideology" all you want. Our goal isn't to make the masses into marxists, that will not happen, they will always just be the masses who lean one way or another on whims and feelings created by those who succeed in gaining control of any given political situation and current at any particular moment in time. Our goal is to make the masses reach the pre-requisite state of being necessary for us to be able to seize control of them when the right political moment arises. We are a vanguard at the head of the masses not at the head of a well educated and ideologically pure marxist army.
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Not sure where you have been but a tight labor market for the past year or so has lead to the largest wage increases in decades, and the bourgeoise don’t like that one bit and are actively attempting to cause a recession to stop the overheated labor market
McDonalds workers in my area are making over $20/hour. That’s not normal for capitalism.
I left nursing before covid making 27/hr, I've come back to nursing making 35/hr, my credentials have not changed in any significant manner and it's not like a year experience gets you an 8 dollar hourly raise. If I went into travel nursing, I could make like 50+/hr. The push towards travel nursing though will absolutely destroy any labor power nursing has by essentially turning all nursing into the equivalent of gig-work.
Also a bunch of places are offering 10k+ sign on bonuses for agreeing to work for a single year.
the more accurate term is "inflation-adjusted effort" , or alternatively, "the tendency of the rate of fucks I give to decline" :marx-goth:
No i am actually listening to very loud death metal thank you
