‘Quiet Firing’ Is ‘Quiet Quitting’s Evil Twin
'Quiet firing' is when an employer makes your life hell without actually letting you go.
Everyone! If you thought you were finally across quiet quitting, then forget about it because we’ve now moved on to quiet firing.
As noted by The Washington Post this week, quiet firing is a passive aggressive phenomenon where employers fail to fulfil anything more than their basic legal responsibilities to their employees until those employees lose their minds and leave.
It’s unclear who came up with the term, but it could well have been a guy called Randy Miller who replied to a post about quiet quitting on Twitter.
“A lot of talk about ‘quiet quitting’ he said, “but very little talk about “quiet firing” which is when you don’t give someone a raise in five years even though you keep doing everything you ask them to.”
A lot of talk about “quiet quitting” but very little talk about “quiet firing” which is when you don’t give someone a raise in 5 years even though they keep doing everything you ask them to.
— Randy Miller (@randy_miller) August 17, 2022
Another Twitter user, Courtney Milan said: “If your employer regularly expects you to do more than your job description for the same pay, call it what it is: quiet firing”.
Obviously there’s nothing new about ‘quiet firing’, it’s just a new term for what some employers have been doing for years: treating their staff badly in the hopes that they resign. This poor treatment can take the form of denying them a raise, whittling down resources, giving confusing performance reviews — maybe even all of the above!
The phenomenon is kind of the inverse ‘quiet quitting’, a trend that recently took hold on TikTok which encourage workers to do no more than their job description requires, which, to be fair, just sounds like doing your job. But given the spectre of hustle culture, girlbossing, and competitive workplaces in general; just doing what is technically required of you has become synonyms with a kind of resignation.
It may be that ‘quiet quitting’ is a very reasonable response to ‘quiet firing’, where people are realising that hustling isn’t giving them anything back in return.
And while ‘quiet quitting’ can kind of be described as a trend, ‘quiet firing’ is better characterised as new language for something that employers have been doing for ages.
Our guess is the two will likely be circling each other for a while!