JUST QUIT IT!

By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

Well, here we are at Labor Day.  I know that because I saw the Christmas decorations up at Target this week.  I wish that we could celebrate one holiday – heck, one season – at a time but I suppose there isn’t any money in that.  Still, as a former Human Resources professional, I do give some thought to Labor Day and its origins.  Our annual honoring of labor dates back to 1894, when Congress declared that the first Monday in September would be set aside as a “general holiday for the laboring classes”. I think they assumed that a day off once a year might compensate for low wages and deplorable working conditions.  When I searched for Labor Day photos, I found this one of the Women’s Typographical Union float.  Ironically, our dad was required to join the typographical union when he first went into the newspaper business.  Fifty years later, when he went to retire, the Typographical union bosses had “mis-invested” his 50 years of contributions.  I have not been a fan of Big Labor since then, but regardless, I have enjoyed having a day off at the end of summer.

I like to follow the trends in employment, not because I’m considering re-joining the workforce, but because I am fascinated by the dynamic between employees and the companies they work for.  In the 80’s the trend to become an entrepreneur was popular, albeit some pretty wacky ideas stemmed from people who tried to out-invent each other.  That led to the “intrapreneur” phase, where people tried to be entrepreneurs within a corporate structure.  Let’s just say that didn’t go well.  In the mid-1990’s Fast Company published Tom Peters’ The Brand Called You.  The article became the launching point for the “Me, Inc.” phenomenon, whereby employees were encouraged to develop a personal brand that they could use to advance their careers.  Michael Jordon posed for Inc Magazine as the poster child for personal branding.  I’m not sure anyone working for a big company achieved the pinnacle of branding Jordan did and the idea died within a couple of years.

Now we are in the era of either “quiet quitting” or “quiet firing”, depending on your vantage point.  Quiet quitting is the act of doing the absolute minimum required to hold on to a job.  These people used to be known as “slackers” – expert at getting others to do all the work.  Today it’s been elevated to an art form.  There are several threads on social media discussing tips on how to fool your employer into thinking you’ve actually accomplished something. No doubt the COVID pandemic and the resultant “work from home” wave made it far easier to fool a boss into thinking work was completed when in reality the only work completed was the laundry. Perhaps as a natual reaction to that, employers have started “quiet firing”, whereby they withhold information, give interesting assignments to just a handful of people, and don’t provide a pay raise for years.  They stay just this side of “constructive discharge” to avoid lawsuits.

Lost in all of this “quitting” is that the people who actually do a lot of the real work in this country don’t have the ability to quit while still on the job.  They are the checkers at the grocery store, the truck drivers, the construction workers and God knows, the medical professionals.  So, I suggest that on this Labor Day we honor the people who do all the work that is often unappreciated and let the people in the corporate “quitting” wars throw their tantrums until finally, on some sunny day in the future, they learn to simply be quiet.