Shot of a young businessman looking bored while working at his desk during late night at work
#QuietQuitting shows up in what feels like a never-ending scroll of videos that have garnered more than 35 million views on TikTok. Most major media outlets have reported on the phenomenon over the past two weeks. Put simply, it is a term that describes workers’ refusals to go the extra mile so their employers can earn higher profits, spend their nights and weekends working, respond to company emails while they’re at music concerts and baby showers, join meetings virtually from their vacations, attend happy hours with bosses and teammates whom they don’t especially like, and so on.
Employees across industries – the majority of whom appear to be in their 20s and 30s – are using social media to affirm each other’s commitments to balancing life and work. Quiet quitters are being praised for setting boundaries and rejecting unhealthy overwork expectation norms that previous generations of workers and leaders set.
Quiet quitting enthusiasts are also being met with some resistance. It seems generational. But “how are you going to advance to higher levels in the company if you do the bare minimum?” is one question those who oppose the rapidly burgeoning movement are repeatedly asking.
Employees doing what is expected of them and nothing more isn’t new, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik argues in his recent Los Angeles Times article. So, why then is there suddenly so much buzz about this phenomenon?
Vengeance for being forced to return to in-office work is one popular explanation. Reportedly, this is how millennials and Gen Z professionals are not-so-quietly pouting about having to come to a place they no longer view as necessary for the production of satisfactory work. Waste two hours commuting, show up to an uninspiring cubicle that lacks privacy, then work extra-hard for eight or more hours? Absolutely not.
News coverage and social media conversations about this new term have been noticeably raceless. Because there is no national registry of self-proclaimed quiet quitters, it’s impossible to take demographic stock of who they are. There isn’t yet a large, sufficiently representative national sample that offers credible data about the ages, races, genders, career stages, and industries of quiet quitters. Is it mostly early career white workers? No one really knows for sure.
I’ve been conducting workplace climate studies at businesses, agencies, and institutions across industries for nearly two decades. At least three recurring findings make me doubt that many quiet quitters are Black.
First, Black professionals have been telling me for years that there are double standards in their workplaces. There’s often a feeling (and sometimes quantifiable proof) that a Black person has to work twice as hard to get half as far as a less accomplished white colleague. Unless Black workers suddenly called a secret national meeting in recent weeks at which they determined that quiet quitting was going to be their collective response to longstanding promotion and pay inequities, it probably isn’t occurring much among them.
The invisibility/hypervisibility paradox is a second experience that numerous Black professionals have described to me in climate studies over the years. On the one hand, they say their potential, talents, and contributions are often rendered invisible by their white colleagues and managers. But on the other hand, they are simultaneously more scrutinized and surveilled at work. Mistakes they make have more severe consequences and are weaponized longer. When the one Black woman on the team isn’t at the meeting, colleagues notice. Given this, they would surely notice if she did the bare minimum in her position and didn’t work as hard as everyone else. She’d likely be fired, demoted, or pushed out of the company.
A third relevant theme from my climate research is the representation burden that’s placed on Black workers. Accordingly, most feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to perform well at work because they fear that failing to do so would result in Black people not getting hired at the company in future years. Not all Black professionals approach work in this collectivist fashion, but enough do to make me doubt that quiet quitting is a widespread behavior that many have selfishly embraced.
Last week, “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah did a segment on quiet quitting in which he comedically pointed out that some jobs don’t lend themselves to workers punching the clock right at 5pm. This is another reason why I don’t believe quiet quitting is really a serious thing among Black professionals. U.S. Department of Labor statistics show that more than 82% of American workers who serve in management and leadership roles are white.
Most workplaces are racially stratified, with Black workers and other employees of color most heavily concentrated in low-paid, low-authority service roles. Racial politics and racialized power asymmetries usually accompany this racial stratification. Hence, I remain unconvinced that Black professionals are suddenly and deliberately working in ways that marginally satisfy their white supervisors’ expectations.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that professionals of color disproportionately perform particular roles that are deemed essential. Not all Black people work in food service, transportation, custodial, secretarial, and other service roles. But those are jobs in which Black workers tend to be most represented. Given that persons in those positions are often treated as expendable, they’re probably not putting their jobs at risk by intentionally doing the absolute minimum. If they work not one minute past 40 hours, it could be because they’re hourly workers who aren’t allowed to exceed a weekly max without the company paying them overtime.
Making oneself susceptible to being fired for doing too little isn’t something many Black workers can afford. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, unemployment last month was nearly double for Black Americans what it was for their white counterparts – 6.0% versus 3.1%. Unemployment disparities are attributable to a complex set of historical, educational, economic, and social forces. Black people categorically quitting their jobs at higher rates than whites isn’t usually among the explanations analysts give. But let’s imagine for a moment that this was a factor… then the data signal that Black employees actually quit, not quietly quit their jobs.
Quiet quitting is fascinating business professionals, commentators, and TikTokers, despite what I’m certain is its lack of racial generalizability. It definitely seems largely irrelevant to the majority of Black professionals who’ve participated in my research.
