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'Quiet quitting' raising a din in stressful US workplaces
The buzzword seems to have first surfaced in a July TikTok post. Are they slackers with a trendy new name? Or are they people at genuine risk of burnout -- who would do best to quit outright?
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On-the-job stress rose from 38 percent of those polled in 2019 to 43 percent the following year as Covid-19 upended the world of work, Gallup found, with women in the United States and Canada facing the most pressure. (Shutterstock/File)
T
hey are drawing a line at the 40-hour work week, limiting after-hours calls and emails and generally, if softly, saying "no" more often -- some American workers are embracing the concept of "quiet quitting" as they push back against what some see as the stifling trap of constant connectivity.
Maggie Perkins -- who lives in Athens, Georgia -- was racking up 60-hour weeks as a matter of course in her job as a teacher, but the 30-year-old realized after her first child was born that something was wrong.
"There's pictures of me grading papers on an airplane on the way to vacation. I did not have a work-life balance," Perkins explains in a TikTok video about how she chose -- though she did not have a name for it back then -- to begin "quiet quitting."
Perkins told AFP she eventually left her job to pursue a PhD, but remains an advocate for her former colleagues -- producing videos and podcasts with practical tips on making their workload fit inside their workday.
"Adopting this 'quiet quitting' mindset really just means that you are establishing a boundary that helps you to do your job when you are paid to do it -- and then you can leave that, and go home and be a human with your family," she says.
- Work-life balance or slacking? -
