American workers are burned out and tired. There’s a solution: unions

theguardian.com:

As a connoisseur of the journalistic art of spinning out fake trends that exist solely to spark heated reactions from readers on the internet, I appreciate the invention of “quiet quitting”.

The term, which can be loosely defined as “people half-assing it at work”, may provoke in you the irrepressible urge to shout: “That’s not new!” Which means it is doing its job as a trend piece. As a piece of social analysis, though, it is most useful for its flaws: it’s just more evidence that the working people of today have all of the frustrations that working people have always had – but they’ve forgotten what we’re actually supposed to do about it.

“Quiet quitting” emerged, like so many pseudo-trends, from the roiling seas of social media, and was then professionally assimilated into the national pseudo-trend ecosystem by a number of mainstream news outlets. It consists of the declarations of people across the country that, as one young worker said: “You’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond” on the job. Well, sure. Aren’t we all?

The real question is not whether this rebranded collective sense of malaise is something new or measurable or even “real” – believe me when I tell you that engaging with trend stories in good faith is a recipe for insanity – but rather, what it says about us that this sort of grasping attempt to put a common feeling into new words seems to strike such a chord in everyone.

And what it says is … Yowz! We really need to teach people about unions.

I’m not trying to be glib here. There is a bottomless appetite for the latest made-up term for the feeling of being so burned out by your shitty job that you just give up. This tells me, above all, that there are and continue to be a lot of people who are