'Quiet quitting' raising a din in stressful
US workplaces

Not gonna spend time with French press, but if the teacher was grading papers on vacation, most likely she was mandating that students do homework on vacation.

They will work a good mule to death.

Doing paperwork in an airplane while on your way to a vacation?? Horrors!

These are the same slackers who whine and moan when they are passed over for promotions and raises.

Working nights, weekends, emails & calls on vacation - cellphones, smart phones, portable computers, emails have MASSIVELY invaded personal space & time. Schedule a vacation 3 months out, after all quarterly reports are final for several weeks,,,,, then modifications to reports/forecasts, update to plans, changes to capital allocations, etc, etc..... Never time to get away w/o being stressed over never ending pile of projects to be done. Outsource 'low level' oeprations to India, 12 hour time difference, they only do what contract says...former staff has pleasure to train Indians or H1Bs to do their job. Management 'projected savings' fail to be as large as 'projected'.....as such you can't hire staff to do additional work....never ends... AFP should outline how Europeans deal with it. They think Americans are crazy - definitely everyone bugs out after work, takes all August off for holiday. This type of corporate behavior and abuse - without compensation - like Amazon and others have been alleged - lead to UNIONS, to fight back against corporate overreach. If your airplane flight gets cancelled in EU - guess what - if you miss a day of work because - YOU get paid $150 euros. EU privacy rules fine the hell out of Google & MS & Meta - all the time - in the US....only Pols get campaign contributions. EU has some things right, US goes to the other extreme. Of course all bets are off - both in US and EU if you are an entrepeneur or selfemployed, but if you're working for a large corporation, they should only lean on you as the exception, not the rule, or Pay Up.

Really this "quiet quitting" represents three different things put under the same umbrella. First, there are indeed organizations which expect people to put in a lot more time than the organization is willing to pay for and some people are pushing back against this. Second, there are people who just do not know when to say when who put in many more hours than they are being paid for. Many organizations look the other way to such behavior under the belief they are benefiting from these people overworking. Some people are realizing that they should not do this and pulling back from doing it. Thirdly, there are people who were hired with the understanding that the job called for a more than 40 hour work week and the pay reflected this fact. Some of those people are also pulling back. This last group is breaking the unspoken agreement they entered into when they accepted the job offer.

Everybody trades their services in return for compensation. The operative word is TRADE. You are trading something of value in return for something of EQUAL value. If the trade is unequal, either the employer of the employee is being shortchanged. If the employer is shortchanged, the employee should be fired. If the employee is shortchanged, they should quit. The employee is putting in a 1000 hours of overtime a year? Did they agree to that? How many hours of overtime did they agree to perform? It wasn't discussed during the overtime interview? Gee, maybe it should have.

That should read... Overtime wasn't discussed during the employment interview? Gee, maybe it should have.

First of all, I dont want "to do things like the [insert nasty description here] Europeans." What are they?! They arent economic engines. They have socialistic markets. They arent Americans and that's fine by me. WE have work ethics and PRIDE ourselves on our hard work. So stop the friggin talk about how we need to be more like the lazy behind Europeans. They can go rot. Second of all, Ill only work what I get paid to work. If the contract agreement is that I only get 40 hours a week, then 40 hours is all they will get out of me. If they want more, then they should offer Time and a Half or simply more benefits. I dont owe the company any more than they owe me. Fair enough?

There are two sides to this. I retired from a company that had no respect for personal boundaries. They would call nights, weekends, holidays, whenever. There is a big difference between this and slackers. I worked to live. I did not live to work.

My wife just retired after forty years of teaching. Grading papers till 10pm along with doing lesson plans was the norm. Forget about a quiet Sunday or doing anything that required being out past till midnight. Sunday was paper grading day and creating lesson plans for the week. Yes, having summers off were fine, except there was also no paycheck as well. Which meant that we started saving to make it through the summer in January because suddenly the household income was cut in half which meant summer vacation was a few days at the beach. No weeklong or longer trips out west or overseas for us. This is the first summer in 38 years where we have money coming in all year round. My wife loved teaching and she would have stayed longer but teaching has become almost unbearable what with all the regulations and restrictions. It was almost like the school system didn't want her to actually teach a subject. She started crying this past June when we were in Target, when school supplies were on display knowing a new school year wasn't starting for her. She loved the kids and there were enough kids in each class she taught who loved her as well.

As a former teacher, I can say there are many, many teachers that quietly quit after several years of having to manage disrespectful and disruptive students. Oppressive, nitpicking micromanagement from the administrators and state education agencies crushes the highly motivated, hard-working work ethic that most teachers start out with. I've watched a number of first-year teachers worn to a frazzle and quit teaching after the first year. It's not worth it. Find something else to do.

Company gave me a "free" phone and laptop. The electronic leash.

Back before cell phones, I worked for a boss who expected me to work until 2 a.m., then return to the office at 7:30 the next morning to give a presentation at 8 a.m. The final straw was when I was home in bed (under doctor's orders) with a serious case of flu and he called me on a speaker phone with half a dozen people in the room. When I got well, I bought an answering machine. That was the beginning of my setting boundaries. Luckily, he transferred to another office within a year.

A teacher working 60 hours a week. You better believe it's not in this country.

Does creating lesson plans mean, pulling open the file drawer and pulling out the notes used for the past ten years? Or updating the provided materials from the woke administrative director of social curriculum? Teachers grading papers on Sundays? What goes on during the all important two hours of paid prep time during an eight hour day?

NO! #16 Lesson plans were not pulled from a file cabinet from ten years ago. Each year the requirements were different. Which means that each year a new lesson plan needed to be created and implemented according to school board regulations. It was exhausting just watching my wife having to jump through hoops to meet each new year's approach to teaching a subject. Each year it got more and more inclusive for every ethnic type of person the school board could come up with even though the subject matter had absolutely nothing to do with ethnicity of the student. Those not involved in education have no clue the hoops teachers have to jump through each and every year to fulfill the requirements called for by administrators in school systems. It's why there are teacher shortages now. Teachers with experience have had it with the interference by school administrators who left teaching years ago and have no clue what their administrative decisions have on teachers and kids. Many of the newer younger teachers are more interested in getting their Starbucks coffee and what bourbon they are going to drink after school. This is one of the many complaints the older teachers and my wife have complained about with the newer teachers.

When I was out there in the workforce before retiring, gradually more and more work was piled on me, and others. Part-timers were hired to do some work. Management was not about to fork out more benefits, i.e. health care and contributing to retirement plans.

I've given every employer I ever worked for everything I had. In the military most of us did. Now that I'm near my second retirement, I'm finding only the young guys do that, and after a few years of being abused they back off too. Of course, the lazy and incompetent (union) employees are paid the same as the rest of us and do a whole lot less for it. When I leave this place for the last time it will be without regrets and no desire to ever have another job again. I read once that nobody ever laid on their death bed wishing they'd spent more time at the office. I can't argue with that.

I think part of the problem is that America is losing its work ethic and those who still have it are being asked to do more and more to compensate for those who do not carry their own weight.