Quiet quitting

Quiet quitting is the new buzzword in the white collar information economy, although as is typical with such things there’s no real consensus about what the term means.

Some people interpret it as a variation on the concept of work to rule, in which workers engage in a kind of informal work action by doing precisely what’s required of them by the formal definition of their jobs, and no more. Others define it more loosely, to mean something like slacking off (in the eyes of management) simply to avoid the burnout that comes from the increasing breakdown of boundaries between work and non-work time in the knowledge economy, from things such as the pervasive availability of work emails, texts, etc.

Not surprisingly plenty of management types see this as a growing crisis, indicating how workers just don’t want to work any more. Those sorts of complaints have always puzzled me from a purely formalistic perspective, since classical economic theory defines labor as what people do only because they have to do it, in order to acquire the resources to do what they would prefer to be doing, aka leisure. (Obviously those categories involve a lot of oversimplification.)

Anyway, discuss.