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After ‘quiet quitting,’ here comes ‘quiet firing’...

The Tradition

HR King
Apr 23, 2002
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There’s been a great hue and cry lately over “quiet quitting”— also known as “working to rule,” “lying flat,” or otherwise declining to go above and beyond what you are paid to do in your job. Quiet quitting looks to many like a reasonable retreat from the round-the-clock hustle culture. But to others, quiet quitting represents disengaged employees sandbagging and shirking all but the minimum effort, not expecting — or not caring — that their employers might fire them for it.

But if we’re going to accuse workers of quiet quitting, we should also acknowledge the phenomenon of “quiet firing,” in which employers avoid providing all but the bare legal minimum, possibly with the aim of getting unwanted employees to quit.

They may deny raises for years, fail to supply resources while piling on demands, give feedback designed to frustrate and confuse, or grant privileges to select workers based on vague, inconsistent performance standards. Those who don’t like it are welcome to leave.

The “work from anywhere” business model offers opportunities for both quiet quitting and quiet firing. Some remote workers, as I discussed recently, are moving out of commuting distance for personal reasons. And some employers are reducing and relocating their office spaces for business reasons. When employers or employees make these changes without due regard for the disruption it causes the other party, it starts to look like they’re daring one another to end the work relationship.

Questions from a couple of readers lead me to ask: What, if anything, do relocating companies owe their workers? Is the attrition of workers who can’t adapt just another form of quiet firing?

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In Japan, this employer action is known as "window sitting".... You're basically George Costanza, sitting in an office with nothing to do.
 
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I find it hilarious that the capitalists are crying about quiet quitting. You see all of these articles in white not saying how awful it is. In reality, they’re just super pissed that younger employees are no longer allowing them selves to be exploited.

The whole term “quiet quitting“ is insulting. They are legitimately complaining that people are doing what they were hired for, and that they cannot steal any more time/labor/other from them unpaid.

And quiet firing is very much a real thing as well. How many times does an employer make things absolutely miserable for people hoping that they would quit, so they don’t have to lay them off and pay unemployment.
 
I took several classes on Soviet history and a popular phrase in the 1970s was “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

It seems to spreading.
 
It's going to be a cat and mouse game until the labor supply is larger than the labor demand. Wall Street and Midtown had this figured out a long time ago and made you work if you wanted your bonus.

We're past that point now imo as sign-on and retention bonuses become the norm
 
They may deny raises for years, fail to supply resources while piling on demands, give feedback designed to frustrate and confuse, or grant privileges to select workers based on vague, inconsistent performance standards
WTF? Does someone think employers haven’t been doing this for years?? Where do they think “quiet quitting” came from?
 
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