News media has been all a flutter about Quiet Quitting since the pandemic. The truth is I believe Navistar invented it during the 1980s, quite possibly while they were still International Harvester. Beyond a shadow of a doubt it originated at a corporation that made the unfortunate decision to hire Keller MBAs. (Especially read the one from Suzanne in Atlanta GA at the bottom of that page.)
MBAs around the world are decrying Quiet Quitting almost as much as they are bemoaning how absolutely nobody will come back into the office. Really bad management has to have people in the office so they can “manage by walking around.”
Hint: This is how MBAs Quiet Quit. They demand everyone come into the office and just walk around instead of actually managing anything. They also bring in Agile because a SCRUM meeting makes it look like they are doing something when in truth they are doing nothing.
How it came to be
No, I’m not going to give you a shot glass sized definition and send you on your way. This is not an Internet clickbait site. I’m going to tell you how this came to be.
Several generations were told “You have to burn the midnight oil to get ahead in life.” We were told we had to get a job, work long hours, not complain, and do without to get ahead. Walmart even made workers work off-clock as part of the corporate culture.
Factory workers had it the worst. They worked hourly and if they had a good union they got a company funded pension after 20+ years of service. It is almost illegal to create a pension plan today. Here’s why.
The pension debacle
- Management promised everything to get workers to work for nothing now. Why not? That was 20 years down the road and their bonus was based on this quarter’s numbers.
- Corporations funded the pension almost entirely with their own stock to avoid having to spend any cash.
- Mitt Romney and Bain Capital off-shored the factories.
- Companies declared bankruptcy to avoid paying pensions.
- Even if you managed to collect a pension you got 65-75% of an hourly wage from 20 years ago. My mom had an uncle that got $90/week. When he started work minimum wage was something like 0.75/hr. At the time he retired it was $2.25/hr. He put in his 20+ years, took retirement, and was trying to live on $90/week some twenty years later when minimum wage was over $7/hr and the cost of living had at least quadrupled.
- Let us not forget, the new young guns hired fresh from MBA school thought it was “just good business” to get rid of older workers so they wouldn’t have to pay your retirement benefits.
Enter the 401K
I forget exactly when, but certainly early in my career the Federal government stepped in and basically made pensions illegal. I think it was after Sears Catalog went belly up. Perhaps it was when International Harvester was going belly up? Both dump a hideous amount of people into the unemployment system. The pension plans, funded by corporate stock which was now worthless, shoved a lot of people into poverty.
Since Federal and State governments were left holding the bag when these mass layoffs hit, the pension system was basically abolished. The 401K retirement plan was created. It had to be funded by mostly cash. Don’t quote me but I believe no more than 10% of its value can be in your company stock. They have to count the shares held by mutual funds too, or so I have been told.
This made retirement portable. You didn’t have company funded healthcare which was also part of pension plans, but at least you had some money. People who got shit-canned after 18 years didn’t have to start at zero building retirement savings. Companies couldn’t reduce their obligations by laying off older workers. Why? The 401K Roller. Day you start your new job you roll that puppy over into either a stand-alone 401K or the 401K at your new employer.
COBRA
Federal, State, and Local governments got really sick of multi-million dollar MBAs dumping shit-loads of people into poverty where they ended up on Medicaid. They forced COBRA down corporate throats. A company may make you pay up to 102% of the monthly healthcare premium when they boot you to the curb, but they generally have to let you extend healthcare. I would say “the bigger the company the more of that premium they have to eat” but I think it depends more on how many they kicked to the curb at once and how honked off the Department of Labor was.
The Annual Review
Ah, MBAs thought they were so smart. They got states like Illinois to declare themselves “at will” states where employees could be terminated “at will” without any need for cause. Then they found out the State, Department of Labor, Unions, and labor lawyers were more often than not able to impose their will on the corporation. If you want to know why there are so many personal injury lawyers in “at will” states it’s because corporations try to can people who get hurt on the job and the courts help empty their pockets. Dumb, dumb, dumb idea MBA.
Because they lost so many lawsuits MBAs and corporate HR came up with the annual review. There was some paperwork involved where you set objectives for yourself and supposedly negotiated with your manager about what you would achieve. Management always wanted salaried workers to put in 120 hours per week and salaried workers always wanted to have a life.
Most of these review systems you will encounter have 5 levels. Level 5 is the “Exceeds all expectations, invented cold fusion over the weekend just for fun” ranking. One is the “terminate immediately” review level.
Level 2
After trying to stuff people directly into Level 1 to trim the payroll and losing in court many many times Level 2 got re-purposed. Level 2 became “Failed to meet expectations, put on corrective action plan, terminate if they fail plan.” Shit-hole companies will file all of the paperwork for the corrective action plan (CAP) but never give you a copy. Three to six months later you will have an impromptu review where it will be stated you never met any of the CAP objectives. Obviously, because you were never given a copy.
These cases aren’t as easy to win so not many lawyers take them on. If you lose your had at work, that’s a slam-dunk paycheck. They actually have to build a case for this one. Thankfully shit-hole companies do the same thing to a whole lot of people at once and class action is much easier to win. Hundreds of people saying the same thing happened to them goes a long way with a jury. The class action lawyer will ask the pertinent question:
Can you produce a copy of the CAP signed by any of the class members?
The pertinent question
When they can’t the jury hands the class the company’s checkbook.
Bottom 10% Purge
Manufacturing companies in cyclical markets (which is most of them) put forth a company policy of getting rid of the bottom 10% at every downturn. Things like heavy trucks follow a 5-7 year cycle. Everybody in the industry knows it. The big fleets wait until they need to replace more than half their truck fleet to purchase anymore. You get a much better deal buying a hundred trucks at a time than you do buying one.
Cars that get sold into the government markets follow a similar pattern. So do school busses. INTEL is finding out the hardware that so do corporate PC sales/leases. Just look at all of the gen-4 stuff in the “refurbished” market now.
So, when the downturn hits, these companies almost instantly lay-off the bottom 10%. How do they determine that? Why, the annual reviews of course. Level 2 people are gone in a heartbeat. Based on all of the individual ratings and math, you just need to be above the middle of Level 3 average score.
Figured it out yet?
Most people have been sick and tired of shit-hole companies telling them:
- Do more with less.
- Give 110%
- Extra effort gets rewarded
That last one is especially fraudulent as most people learned during the pandemic. Shit-hole companies leapt at the idea of furloughing workers to reduce payroll by 20% while expecting the same amount of work to get done. Adding insult to injury the one day per week you were furloughed could not be Monday or Friday. Then they learned contractors didn’t get wages cut because they had a signed contract. For a final kick to the teeth many companies decided to take an extra 10% cut on top of the furlough cut. Thirty percent of your wages gone because some little MBA thought they could.
Quiet Quitting
Quiet Quitting is the art of staying between the upper half of Level 3 and the middle of Level 4 without ever risking getting close to Level 5. You have a life, family, and fun. It is the knowledge that management is simply there to screw you any way they can to get a bigger quarterly bonus and not buying the bullshit. If they are adamant they will only pay you for 8 hours you aren’t there even one minute past 8 hours. Really bad management will schedule meetings for 4:30 trying to get free time out of you. Quiet Quitting means you re-schedule those meetings for first thing in the morning.
Putting in extra effort meant something when we got something for it, but decades of watching management screw the worker 8 ways to Sunday have made Quiet Quitting a permanent societal fixture.
