Can a toxic employer-employee relationship be healed?
This is the question nestled at the root of a spate of trends that have recently made their way through workplace hot-take culture, from over-employment to rage-applying to strategic job-hopping to, most famously, quiet quitting — the practice of doing the absolute bare minimum at work, with no effort to engage, emote, or perform beyond what is contractually required.
Are these trends actually rampant? Nobody really seems to know. But their actual prevalence isn’t what makes them so compelling to talk about. We talk about them because they represent an utter breakdown in the relationship between the employer and the employee. We talk about them like we talk about celebrity break-ups, or new bits of gossip about our frenemies. When we bring the topic up to our friends (or, if we’re feeling spicy, our coworkers), we are subtly asking them: whose side are you on? Do you condemn the quiet quitter as a bad-faith freeloader, or do you cheer them on as a hero of self care and self-confidence?
If you ask the disgruntled denizens of Reddit, quiet quitting is not only okay — it’s the right thing to do. In one popular post, a Redditor tells the story of a time when an older coworker asked them why so many young people are quiet quitting these days. The Redditor responded with a counter-question: why are so many employers quiet paying these days? That is, why are they only paying their employees what is contractually specified and never going above and beyond? This question was asked facetiously, of course — we don’t usually expect employers to pay more than what is contractually specified. But that was exactly the Redditor’s point — if my employer consistently shows that they are not interested in investing in me beyond the bare minimum, why should I invest in them?
In other words, quiet quitting is ultimately an assertion of the right not to give. And as we saw in an earlier entry, though that can be liberating to some degree, it is only ever a qualified good — we gain our freedom, yes, but at the cost of lightly estranging ourselves from our humanity.
This is perhaps easier to see when we recognize that the relationship between the quiet-quitting employee and his or her employer is essentially the workplace equivalent of a toxic relationship, where trust has become so low on both sides that each side has come to expect betrayal rather than care. This lack of trust in a relationship is self-reinforcing — rather than seeking to love or give to the other, each side is now focused on either protecting themselves or counter-exploiting the other.
Seen this way, the act of quiet quitting is the workplace equivalent of grey-rocking, a communication method that has also gained traction online recently, in which a victim of emotional abuse who can’t escape their abuser instead becomes minimally-responsive and as boring as possible, in the hopes that their abuser will lose interest and eventually stop initiating conversation. The only problem is that (as is also attested by countless Redditors) grey-rocking itself is emotionally exhausting, since it requires that you become a rock rather than a human — stifling your natural good-will tendencies and replacing them with a protective layer of unfeeling stone.
Likewise, the quiet quitter effectively protects himself from the abuse of his employer, but in doing so, locks himself into a dehumanized state during his hours on the job. By asserting his right not to give, he cements the loss of his right to give. There is no longer any chance that he will actually enjoy his job, let alone find fulfillment or meaning through it.
Is there any hope for a situation like this? Can the quiet quitter and his employer be reconciled, and his right to give restored? It is hard to make any general claims. Like a romantic or familial relationship that has reached the point of grey-rocking, the easiest solution in the case of quiet-quitting is often for employer and employee to go their separate ways. But there is hope. If the employer and employee are both committed to seeking resolution, a contributist perspective does provide some clarity on the way forward.
The relationship between the contributist employer and employee is fundamentally different from that of the capitalist employer and employee. This is because the dynamic between the capitalist employer and employee is one of mutual taking — both parties are acting primarily in their own self-interest. But the dynamic between the contributist employer and employee is one of mutual giving — the employer’s primary priority in relation to the employee is protecting their right to give through their role at the organization, and the employee’s primary priority is exercising that right. (This is described in detail by Laila the Contributist in entry 11). This means that the employer and employee are both oriented towards each other and towards the organization’s mission, while their capitalist counterparts are primarily oriented towards themselves.
Let’s consider what this looks like on a practical level. The employee who quiet quits (let’s call him Max) does so because, fundamentally, he believes that his employer’s ultimate goals are not aligned to his. And, in a capitalist context, this is often true. Max’s aim is simply to make it to his next paycheck, and the aim of his employer (let’s call her Carol) is to extract whatever value is possible from Max, without breaking the terms of the contract or driving him to quit. (And since Max is dependent on the job for his livelihood, this usually means Carol can get away with a lot of abuse, as long as she stays within the bounds of employment law.)
In this situation, the employer and employee are at odds. Carol is best served by constantly finding new ways for Max to engage, bringing him close to his breaking point, but never past it. But Max is best served by minimizing engagement with Carol, so that he can avoid any potential abuse and get to his paycheck while expending the least effort possible. That way, even if he spends most of his day grey-rocking at work, he’ll still at least have the physical and emotional energy to spend his evening hours doing something he enjoys.
But what if Max decides that he’s despairing of quiet quitting; that he is tired of dehumanization, and wants to reclaim his whole day by finding fulfillment from his work? In other words, what if Max decides that he wants to assert his right to give at work?
Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that anyone can find fulfillment in their work, regardless of whether they are happy with the job they have. This is because we find fulfillment in the act of giving, and the right to give can never be fully taken from us — everyone has something to give. And although it is better when we can choose how or where we give, we can find fulfillment in our jobs even when our freedom is restricted; this is detailed in the previous entry. That’s what’s so liberating about asserting the right to give — giving oversteps coercion, irrefutably proving our dignity and humanity, even when others try to strip them away. Max can choose at any moment to orient himself towards giving in his job, and in that moment, he rescues himself from his despair.
The bad news is that giving can be more or less fulfilling depending on a few factors, and unless Carol changes as well, Max’s situation is likely to be much less fulfilling than he deserves. This is because the capitalist employer seeks to exploit their employee’s generosity, taking what they can while giving as little as possible in return. This means that Max’s hard work is not only limited in freedom, it is also undervalued, leaving him feeling less dignified than he would if Carol was a better employer.
But there is hope here as well, because Carol’s behavior can change too. If she chooses to become a contributist, then her relationship to Max changes from one of exploitation to one of support. As Max’s employer, her role is to do what she can to help Max to give through his work — a role that will make Max feel both appreciated and excited about his work, and make him a more effective employee.
As is, the capitalist Carol may think she is getting the better of Max through exploitation, but her behavior is actually just as self-defeating as Max’s quiet quitting was. Not only is she denying her own dignity and humanity by exploiting rather than giving, she is also putting her business at risk, because she is likely to lose Max as an employee if she continues to exploit him. And as our Contributist and the Capitalist series argues, the contributist organization can be much more effective than the capitalist organization in the long run.
Max may try to convince Carol of this, but if she refuses to change and continues to exploit him, Max should feel no obligation to continue to give. Giving is not giving, and is therefore not humanizing, if it is done out of obligation. He cannot force her to change, so he is better off trying to find new employment. Whether he chooses in the meantime to keep giving or to quiet quit is ultimately up to him.
So, is there hope for the quiet quitter? It depends, as in any relationship, on his and his partner’s willingness to change. To be clear, the quiet quitter is the victim here; his employer has far more power over him than he has over his employer, and it is fully his right to choose to disengage. But quiet quitting is not an aspiration, it’s a resignation. And if he and his employer can’t reconcile, I suspect that he’d probably be better off making it official and finding new employment. But let’s hope that they can find it in themselves to give.