Slackers, Great Resigners, Quiet Quitters, and You

My family ran a large New York City diner for four decades. I spent the latter twenty of its years there, managing the day half of its 24/7 operation (my brother owned the nights). Across those decades, we employed literally thousands of people, a few dozen at a time. Some were with us decades (our longest tenured was with us 33 years), some years, some months, and some a day or an hour. While many came through our doors with useful experience and vital skill sets, we trained hundreds, and possibly thousands, up from scratch. Restaurants offer such access - some jobs (floor managers, chef, baker, line cooks, servers) require skill, but others (bussing tables, seating customers, washing dishes, mopping floors, etc) are truly entry-level, and can be learned on the fly. The interrelated job environment and our willingness to train (and let them train) made the restaurant a good place for anyone with desire to build a skillset and climb a career ladder.

Indeed, we witnessed our share of people who started with us knowing nothing, grew up in the place, reached management level, and opened their own restaurants (or carried their experience to other jobs and other careers). We've also served as a bridge for countless young people attending college and building professional careers.

Along the way, we learned many things about employing people.

Among them: Anyone who says "if you want me to work harder, you need to pay me more..." won't.

That lesson popped into my head as I read about this distressing trend of "quiet-quitting." Part of the growing abandonment of work ethic and self-reliance, it joins the Great Resignation and the one-third of working age men who don't have any gainful employment as threats to the nation's wealth, productivity, and living standards.

Used to be, all these behaviors were accreted together under one term:

Slacker.

We all know what a slacker is. We've all known slackers. We all understand what we get from slackers - as friends, as co-workers, and as members of society. Much fun was made by pop culture in correlating slacking with weed, and the correlation may indeed contain some causality, but that's an aside - we didn't see slacking as aspirational, or exalt it as smart, or admire those who opted to coast through life rather than put the work in.

Today, however, it seems that those who find ways to "stick it" to their bosses by doing as little as possible while continuing to draw a paycheck are role models and the subject of much envy. While this phenomenon predates the pandemic, it does appear that it was greatly amplified by the lockdowns and resultant work-from-home (WFH) explosion, the flood of Other People's Money enabling those who decided they'd rather not go back to work, and an ever-growing sense of entitlement to a life of ease.

There is such a thing as work-life balance, and there are obviously employers who tip it as much as they can in their direction. Times of economic hardship can give bosses leverage, and times of economic boom and tight labor markets can give employees negotiating power, but at the end of the day it's about creating wealth.

Creating wealth puts food on both the boss's and employee's tables, roofs over their heads, and clothes on their backs. Creating wealth improves living standards, grows the economy, and "lifts all boats." Creating wealth funds the services that governments (federal, state, and local) are supposed to provide to the people. Creating wealth provides leisure time and discretionary income. Remember - the baseline human condition is poverty and misery, and in creating wealth, we elevate not only ourselves, but all others who benefit from that which we create.

It is an abundance of societal wealth that enables the slacker. If a nation is as far above subsistence living in the aggregate as ours is, there is ample room for inefficiency - even after taking care of those who legitimately cannot fend for themselves. When such is handled in the private sector, there is a feedback mechanism to counterweigh the able-but-lazy. But, when government is fire-hosing money as it does, there's little to keep the slacker from living, and even thriving, off others' efforts.

A free society does not obligate anyone to work. To a particular standard, or at all for that matter. If an individual can finesse a slacker lifestyle off the largesse of friends or family, it's neither your nor my business. However, we don't have to exalt or admire this parasitism, and we actually do cultural harm when we do. There is a work-life balance, but work is part of life, and if taken to the end-state, admiration for not-work will ultimately bring about economic collapse, crater living standards, and crush a nation. Even before that end-state, there is the matter of national competitiveness. America has long exalted its top-dog status. Our economy is the biggest in the world, despite other nations having far larger populations. Our per-capita GDP is the highest of all large nations, surpassed only by small wealthy localities like Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Luxembourg, and Singapore and small nations like Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, and the Cayman Islands that have made their bank by becoming international financial centers (or relying on lots of oil and few people). Each has fewer residents than New York City.

Without work, without productivity, without wealth-creation, our living standards will not sustain in the long run.

Technology has enabled WFH in countless professions where it would have been unimaginable decades ago. Trading stocks and commodities use to happen on trading floors (or "pits"), face-to-face, but they've been replaced by tech, and the few that remain are dinosaurs. A good friend has a high paying tech job for an employer half-way across the nation, and has yet to actually set foot there. Countless professional and STEM jobs can now be done from home, part, most, or all the time. While WFH comes with the risk of distraction, lack of motivation, and, well, slacking, some analysts have concluded that the up-sides (e.g. no time or energy lost to commute) counterweigh those negatives. Others conclude the opposite.

Count me among those skeptical of the idea that WFH will result in greater productivity overall. Especially with the exaltation of "shadow-quitting" and other re-namings of slacking. Individuals vary in motivation, and I know plenty who are getting more done than ever now that the hours lost to commuting each week are erased. But, we all know that far from everyone out there is self-motivated and ambitious enough to leverage that time productively, and I expect that the young, especially, are susceptible to the siren-song of slack and sloth.

Add that damage to the immense harm caused by endless school lockdowns and the masking of children - harm imposed by selfish, narcissistic, sociopathic megalomaniacs (yes, I have a strong opinion on the matter) masquerading as top-of-the-food-chain public servants. Two, and perhaps three, generations of young are being ruined by the Best-and-Brightest who set policy and declare cultural norms, and those who raise skeptical eyebrows at these trends are mocked, derided, and worse.

It hasn't taken us long for the "everyone gets a trophy" trend to morph into "nothing is my fault blame deflection and then to "society owes me because I exist" selfishness. People whose college degrees (see: four years of partying and self-indulgent course selection) aren't paying for what they cost are clapping at half a trillion dollars of Other People's Money being sent their way. Takers (they used to be called criminals, but if no one enforces the law, does it even count as a crime any more?) are putting retailers out of business by shoplifting with impunity, helping themselves to others' stuff, squatting on others' property without paying the rents they agreed to, and on and on.

All this is not only abetted by a government that has chosen to side with the takers over the makers, but by a cultural elite that continually finds new and creative ways to rationalize and justify such anti-social behavior.

For it is exactly that - anti-social. Societies require their members to cooperate, to work with and amongst each other, and productivity is the health of a society - and its members. Success is its own reward, and pride in accomplishment is far more fulfilling than leeching off others. You don’t have to love your job, and it can indeed simply be how you put food on the table, but you can choose to do it well, and respect your co-workers, your employers, and yourself in the process.

We each pursue our own happiness, and we each enjoy our liberties, and if you can slack without forcing others to carry you, hey, it's your life, do as you wish.

I’ll write that again.

It’s your life, do as you wish.

However, you don't deserve praise for creative slacking or quiet-quitting, and you certainly don't deserve to live off the fruits of others’ labor. Those impressed by your slack are people I have no reason to admire.

And, if you want a raise, show me you deserve it. I’ve got every incentive to reward and retain good workers, but no one who told me, "I'll do better after you start paying me more," ever came through on that promise.

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Thank you, again, for your support!

Peter.