Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for September 26, 2022

Slackers.

Fine. Do that. I hate the expectation of tipping culture anyway. The phony airs of concern isn’t even a part of it at all nowadays.

I worked for my dad from when I was 12. I got a job in a store while in college (and kept working for my dad). I got a job in accounting when I graduated. Boss decided to retire dad and I bought him out – so I was working for my dad again . Dad died – I have been working for myself for close to 30 years. Have a second job – husband and I have a craft business together.

Mostly have not have not had goof off jobs.

(And when I sold Jewelry at a large, local home goods store when in college someone actually once offered me a tip and I turned it down. Same happened to husband while he was working while in college in a department store’s “basement shoes” – he also turned it down.)

“Quiet Quitting” is a new name for an old idea— “work to wage”. Basically, I’ll do what you pay me to do, I’ll do it well, but that’s it. No voluntary unpaid overtime, no covering two jobs ‘just until we hire someone’, no taking on your manager’s tasks in an attempt to impress them. An hour’s work for an hour’s pay, period. Taking on extra work hasn’t led to anything but more work in decades, and people are finally realizing that’s not going to change. The term ‘quiet quitting’ was invented by higher-ups who are freaking out at the idea of having to fully staff their businesses instead of bilking their employees out of more work than they’re paying for.

Always organized work that I enjoyed and so enjoyed working.

♫ “Seems that I was busy doing something close to nothing” ♫

I love how every time someone takes a look at “quiet quitting”, the immediate reaction is ALWAYS “How is this new?”

Quiet quitting humor:

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Armageddon.

Armageddon who?

Armageddon out of here!

We millennials were brought up to believe that going above and beyond expectations in the workplace would reap rewards both financially and in character. We found out the hard way that that was a crock from those who wanted to take advantage of us, especially when many of us lost jobs and careers to two major recessions before we turned forty.

really, what a doop.

Wage slavery has been discovered…

“Quiet quitting” is just bizspeak for workers not giving their labor away and only doing what they’re paid to do.

My boss would give me my review and I was adequate. Now there is no way I was going to make my boss a LIAR! So I was adequate!

Funny how “doing the job you’re paid to do” gets positioned as a new, questionable thing.

Out of college I thought I’d be working the rest of my life for the first company that hired me. Seems silly now to have thought that way, but I don’t think I was alone. With a generation coming in that has spent way to many hours playing video games, I’m not surprised at their having a different mind set. We will have to see where this new attitude leads us.

Your boss won’t pay you any more than he absolutely has to. Why should you do any more work than you absolutely have to?

And many of those slackers are on their phones all day too, aren’t they Janis?

TikTok a Chinese subtle destroyer!

what a sad world you all lived in. Every company i ever worked for paid me my due. Even when I took night school courses to better learn the trade the bosses found out and not only paid me more but reimbursed me for my courses well after the fact. the only time i worked to rule as it were, was my time in the military. Now I’ve been fired from a few jobs and quit many more to take a step up the ladder but I was never taken advantage of.

Exactly.

Boomers: Why aren’t young people putting in extra effort for the money?

Mils: Why won’t owners pay enough to live on for work?

I didn’t quiet quit. After being told we needed to work Sunday, after already working 10 hour shift m-f and 8 Saturday (normal work week) I yelled to my manager across the room “I quit”. I was already planning on quiting and doing it quietly, but the Sunday thing got me mad. Retired 2 weeks later. BTW we didn’t have to work Sunday after this.

I can’t relate at all. When I found how much I loved troubleshooting electronics (age 14) it translated into my first job at age 17. I could hardly believe I was being paid – only $3 per hour, but in 1970 that was enough – for making things that didn’t work, work.

Fast forward 20 years and a change of career: now doing field fixes on things in gorgeous natural settings. A lot of people dreaded the call in the night, but I lived for it… God help me, a lost sinner! Snow cats are nobody’s favorite, but the adventure is like hot peppers on a pizza. I never gave less than my best because although my employers were paying me well enough I was doing it for me until my drive and body gave out. My last high profile assignment was a gift to me: developing a preventive maintenance system for the department. I had three months and beat the deadline by two weeks, and it was absolute heaven to me. My legacy would be ongoing prevention of failures in the entire department with a system that would stand up to regulatory scrutiny. When the Director tasked our department with it my boss said, “I have just the man for it.” Six months after I rolled it out to much acclaim I turned in my papers. I went out on a higher note than I ever had imagined.

Retirement was not about money to me; it was saying good bye to the first love of my life to spend more time with my second love. Life is very, very good.

I worked as hard as my employer paid me to work. My first mechanic jib paid $6 per hour as an apprentice. My last mechanic job paid $22 per hour. Adjusted for inflation I never got a raise. Mechanics supply their own tools in most cases, in my case over $45,000. Everything went up way faster than pay. When my manager gave me crap about doing something extra I’d ask him if he had to supply his own desk or pencils.

The term where I work is “retiring in place”.

I always do my best. ’Tain’t much but it’s all I got.

I’m in several men’s groups with mostly retirees from various jobs and walks of life. Almost every guy never discusses his past work life. I imagine if working was so great, guys would discuss it more. OTOH, the veterans seem to cling to memories of their time in service, but I can’t relate to that, luckily having had a high draft number.

Alert to the media: there have always been folk who did the bare minimum to keep their jobs, it ain’t a new concept.

People should have more pride in their work.

I never do that I worked like I was getting paid very well even when I wasn’t.

Thank you all for your perspective.

When I started working at the university we were all keen and willing to give 110%. Then we went for reclassification and management decided our jobs weren’t very important, and didn’t want to pay us what we were worth. Folks did a lot of quiet quitting after we heard that…

Um, no. This boomer knows that “quiet quitting” is a phrase coined to make workers looks lazy. The proper term is “working to rule” (or “working to the rule”), and what workers are doing now are working their assigned hours (instead of working off the clock), and turning off their business phones and email after hours. In other words, workers are setting appropriate boundaries and Big Business doesn’t like that. When I hear “quiet quitting”, I hear “anti-worker, anti-union”.

It’s not a new thing.

I lost a sweet, beautiful cat to a vet who was just “quietly quitting” a month ago.

I worked alongside a woman that would leave her station to go visit friends, while I stayed and worked continuously. At the end of the day when the supervisor asked for the number of units completed, I would tell him my number, then somehow, she would have done 2 or 3 more than me. (We didn’t have the serial number tracking system at that time.) I also worked with a disabled guy who only had one arm. The other arm was always holding his cell phone all through the shift.

Hope TIAA misses me. Gave them my all for 15 years and they threw me away over a toxic vaccine.