Abygail Liera began “quiet quitting” after clashing with a new boss.
Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/TNS
Abygail Liera sympathized when she first read about people who were “quiet quitting,” refusing to go above and beyond at their jobs.
But it wasn’t until a few months later that she understood.
The resident of Los Angeles’ Winnetka neighborhood got a new boss and was expected to train him, but when she asked for a raise, she said she was told, “We’ll see.” Her boss discouraged open and honest feedback, making her work environment feel toxic and disrespectful.
“I remember reading it, and I’m like, ‘Damn, this sucks that people have to go through this,’ ” said Liera, 32, of the news article on quiet quitting. “At the same time, I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know what that feels like.’ But now I do.”
Since the pandemic, work-related phrases such as “quiet quitting” or “Great Resignation” have taken over the internet — and are now part of our everyday vocabulary. Social media is filled with work-related memes and videos that describe “rage applying” or “lazy girl jobs.” People share tips on Reddit about how to effectively — and surreptitiously — “polywork,” or hold multiple jobs at the same time.
This proliferation of workplace lingo is more than a fad: It’s a viral language showing how workers are trying to hold onto the power they suddenly gained during the pandemic, workplace experts say.
After March 2020, workers were able to leverage the tight labor market to get what they want. But recent layoffs across a number of industries have shown that the balance of power between employee and employer today is, at best, a constantly tilting seesaw.
The job cuts and mandatory return-to-office policies imply that companies are gaining the upper hand on their employees, yet the persistence of hybrid work policies may show that workers have made a permanent mark on how work gets done in the future.
Employment data suggest that a growing number of people are prioritizing work-life balance in a more meaningful way or, increasingly cynical about traditional work arrangements, are tailoring those structures to work for them.
“As cynicism grows with the status-quo aspects of work, it feels like this push-and-pull between management and workers,” said Eric Anicich, associate professor of management and organization at USC’s Marshall School of Business.
“This idea of disliking your boss and hating your job is as old as time,” Anicich said. “Now we have a certain language for it, and there’s a certain way of tapping into a community of people who feel the same way that we haven’t had in the past.”
Pandemic epiphanies, burnout and coining a new term
For 10 years, Alisha Miranda juggled two careers — a 9-to-5 job in creative and digital agencies and, in her spare time, freelance journalism.
But by June 2021, she’d had enough.
Working from home during the pandemic blurred the lines between work and her personal life, exacerbating a years-long feeling of burnout. Miranda had toiled for years at her day job without receiving a promotion or a pay raise, despite indications from her managers that one was coming. She even continued working while grieving the deaths of loved ones from COVID-19. The final straw came when a large ad campaign she’d been working on was suddenly pushed back indefinitely.
“I can’t picture doing this for one more day,” Miranda, 38, remembers telling herself. “I have got to go.”
Miranda joined the historic wave of millions of U.S. workers who left their jobs in 2021 and 2022 because of high levels of burnout or “pandemic epiphanies,” in which about two-thirds of employees took a step back and reconsidered the role of work in their lives.
Add to that the increased prevalence of remote work, which finally allowed workers to have some measure of control over their schedule, and it’s no wonder there was a wave of resignations, said Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the UCL School of Management in London, who coined the term “Great Resignation.”
Usually, the company is the one with power over workers because bosses can fire them at any moment. But the word “resignation” shifts that power to workers, giving them control over their own job, Klotz said. That applies, too, to other viral work phrases, such as “bare minimum Mondays.”
Doing only what’s required of you, and no more
After her boss started cracking down, Abygail Liera cut back on her productivity and started typing emails at a snail’s pace or revising them six or seven times, and dialing phone numbers with extra care.
“My work ethic is going to reflect on your leadership,” she recalled thinking.
Eventually Liera’s “quiet quitting” turned into actual quitting. She left her job in December and is now looking for a new gig.
The term “quiet quitting” is difficult to define, said Yongseok Shin, an economics professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Although some interpret it as a way to increase work-life balance, others define it as a way to recoup unpaid or unappreciated hours of service.
Intrigued by the viral term, Shin and his colleagues conducted research on whether the number of hours employees worked contributed to the tight labor market.
In his research on the phenomenon, Shin and colleagues found that from 2019 to 2023, workers voluntarily reduced the number of hours they worked.
In essence, these workers were reducing the intensity of their work and reassessing their relationship to their jobs, whether it was cutting back on weekend hours or potentially decreasing their work in response to a lack of appreciation at the office, Shin said.
