When "line go up" mentality gets applied to your workforce. God forbid they keep working to the same standard they always have, must be moar! Always moar!
Oh yes. The company where I work at does these performance reviews: doing 100% gives you a 'C' (as a grade). I do everything that is expected from me without anything to complain about? Yeah, that's not good enough.
Fuck that.
There is the silent complaint that you could do more... Give up your spare time for your work. Work yourself tired and burn out for your company! That's what they want to see.
I'm looking for a new job while I still work there.
Funny and strange that the article came from The Irish Times. I live in Ireland, and foreign nationals love to work here because of more laidback working culture. This is not "quiet quitting" in the Irish context, it's "as long as all your work is done, you can do whatever the fuck you want."
I have culture shock hearing from others who worked abroad and say how toxic the work environments are in some places. I had co-workers from Spain and Portugal say you can get pressured to work on weekends, or do tasks outside of working hours. Verbal abuse and shouting also happens more frequently.
I worked on one of the largest Portuguese tech companies, it was kinda dependent on the business area. In the telcos department I barely had to do any overtime, it was only for emergencies. My colleagues in the banking department, however, wouldn't ever see the light of day. They arrived before sunrise and left long after sunfall. Projects were submitted at a loss to in the hope of netting future projects. Developers were supposed to work overtime to compensate this... If you refused to work overtime your carreer would have end at that company.
There's always been a push towards seeing working as a value in itself, but it was easier to trick people into working around the clock when wages allowed to reach one's goals (a house, financial stability, sending your kids to college). It's more difficult when workers live paycheck to paycheck and know that they won't be economically able to retire.
Parkinson's law: Work expands to consume the time available. (1955)
This is just blaming bureaucratic drift on the workforce. Only in the 2020s (or since the late 1980s) companies abandoned any care or concern for their own workers, and are glad to lay them off during growth to maximize profit.
The ownership class will tremble something something. We literally have nothing left to lose but our chains.
"They asked us to pay them in money and not pizza parties, then the janitor came in and said "Wait you guys are getting Pizza Parties? I can't even get some cleaning agent to wipe the god damn toilet down properly with, I've been spitting on it and waiting for management to notice the smell and order more fucking cleaning agent and they're just giving you guys free pizza?" it's a mystery why they keep leaving., maybe we should try putting in an Air Hockey table that they'll never have long enough breaks to actually us?" - Management
