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That,I promise,is not my way of telling you to “Google it,mate”,but simply an introductory warning:what I’m about to say is almost certainly not a fresh take.

First,a very quick summary. The term came to prominence earlier this year when a 24-year-old New Yorker by the name of Zaid Khan posted a 17-second video beginning with “I recently learned about this term quiet quitting…” He went on to give a brief definition:“You’re not outright quitting your job but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond … no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life.” It now has 500,000 like,4500 comments and has been shared 42,000 times.

Jessica Irvine wrote about it inThe Sydney Morning Herald a month ago. It’s an excellent article and I agree with much of what she said,including:“... for most workers,I think the healthier approach[to quietly pulling back from some of their employers’ more onerous expectations] would be an open and honest conversation with managers about the limited number of hours in the day and how best they can organise their working lives to produce the required outputs.

“Collectively,a noisy push-back against the infiltration of work into our traditional home hours would benefit all workers,even more so for female workers who still bear the disproportionate share of caring duties.”

We might also need to noisily push back against the idea – the almost inevitable response from certain commentators and groups – that this is simply a case of unprecedented laziness.

Here’s the thing about people not wanting to work:we’ve been assured it’s a disease endemic to this generation,or this current state of world affairs,or this age of entitlement for well over 100 years. This was amusinglysummarised in a thread on Twitter in which University of Calgary researcher Paul Fairie posted an excerpt from a newspaper article on the topic of “nobody wants to work any more” from every decade going back to 1894.

People,it seems,have always been wistful for the good old days when five-year-olds could work for 14 hours straight without complaint,only stopping when their arm was mutilated in a horse hair carding machine.

No,this has nothing to do with the “indolence” of Millennials or Zoomers. It may not have anything to do with anything much at all if you believe the recent story byDerek Thompson inThe Atlantic. Statistically speaking,at least.

He probably wasn’t the first to say it,but may have said it from the most high-profile platform:“What the kids are now calling ‘quiet quitting’ was,in previous decades,simply known as ‘having a job’.” The article features a line graph showing Gallup research into employee engagement,a study they’ve undertaken annually for at least the last 20 years. It shows almost no change in “active disengagement” (admittedly only for American workers) since 2000.

As Thompson says “...tell me that this is anything more than two stable lines jostling within a margin of error. As a workplace phenomenon,workers’ mild disengagement is about as novel as cubicles,lunch breaks,and bleary-eyed colleagues stopping by your workstation to mutter,‘Mondays,amirite?’.”

Despite it clearly being a new term for an age-old phenomenon,quiet quitting has been painted by some as a bizarre and odious new trend malignly influenced by those who are ambivalent about – even (GASP!) indifferent to – their jobs. What I think is far more outlandish is the implication that the details of a job description or the limits set out in an award should be considered absolute bare minimums;the reference material of the ne’er-do-well.

Do you need to get in on the quiet quitting act? It’s not an act. By all means go “above and beyond” if you love your work,but you’re not fleecing your boss by doing your job and having plenty of time left over for everything else.

Send your questions to Work Therapy:jonathan@theinkbureau.com.au

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