Somebody in HR needed a term for “employees doing their actual job and nothing more,” and instead of calling it “having a job,” they called it quiet quitting — which made it sound like sabotage instead of what it is: the bare minimum definition of employment.
The phrase caught on because it’s useful to whoever’s paying you. If not doing free unpaid extra work is “quitting,” then the expectation was never 40 hours, it was 40-plus-whatever-we-can-get. Naming the boundary as a betrayal is a tidy way to keep people from setting one.
Every “quiet quitting is killing productivity” thinkpiece has the same unstated premise: that unpaid extra effort was the baseline, and anything less is decline. Nobody asks why the baseline crept up in the first place, or who benefited while it did. It certainly wasn’t the person answering Slack messages at 9pm for the same salary they had two raises ago.
Doing your job, as described, for the pay you agreed to, is not a labor movement. It’s a job. If
