Business Trend: Lying Flat and Quiet Quitting

“Work your wage” and “don’t give into them!” have become halcyon calls of workers in this new economy. While “quiet quitting” has been the trend in American workplaces for a year now, the Chinese first led the way with the “lying flat” movement that protested the punishing Chinese work culture. Whether workers are lying flat or quiet quitting, the reality is that people have had it with low staffing, high expectations, and low wages.

People matter

When Jack Welch coined the term, “shareholder capitalism” his focus was on breaking the back of what he saw as a corporate culture that was too accommodating to workers and the needs of the organization and not enough on creating return for shareholders. When he became CEO of General Electric in 1981, he started his tenure with mass layoffs. GE was one of the biggest employers in the country. That began a trend of layoffs and offshoring that turned a company that was legendary for being a source of good and jobs and turned it into a shell of its mid-20th century self.

When I was in Pittsfield, MA, I got to see the old GE plant up close and personal. I have a buddy that lives just over the road from it, the old plant. It hangs on in the town like a specter. Its metallic hulk stands there like the ghost of economics past. It provided many good jobs for an area that is now economically depressed and struggling. What if Jack Welch had made a different decision?

The reality is that what is good for shareholders is not always what is good for workers, but what is good for workers can still be good for shareholders. Happy, healthy, and well-paid workers stay longer, reduce training costs, and are more productive. If there is one thing that the quiet quitting/lay flat movement shows is that companies have forgotten all about people, the heart of any business.

CEOs pay a lot of lip service to this idea. Interviews will show CEOs saying phrases like, “Our greatest strength is our people!” But the reality is that they certainly don’t run their businesses in that manner or with people in mind. Layoffs happen with little regard to the people of the business. It’s all about the bottom line. However, without people, there is no business at all and the quiet quitting movement is a way for people to remind their bosses of that uncomfortable truth. A pizza party is not going to solve the problem.

Fair pay, matching industry and markets

As I wrote in my essay, 1977: The Rise of Discounters and Deregulation, one of the great crimes of the past 50 years or so is the suppression of wages. Thanks to mass retirements stemming from the pandemic, this trend has begun to reverse itself. Wages have started to rise for the first time in decades, but unfortunately, those wage gains have been wiped out by inflation.

It is important that companies start being more transparent about salary and pay, both externally for jobs and internally for people within the organization. This is one of the great things about unions: pay scales are a known quantity. This is progress is making sure that pay is fair and people and employers have to be honest about compensation. This would also encourage open competition of labor between companies. Whoever is willing to pay well will attract the best talent. Transparency makes free markets possible and the employment is marketed as a free market but isn’t because of the lack of transparency around wages. Sites like Glassdoor ask people to report on this to help people figure out what to ask for during the hiring process. It shouldn’t have to be that difficult.

There is also the principle of fairly compensating people for their labor. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, companies just need to make less money. Not every quarter needs to be a windfall profits quarter in order for big business to survive. Making sure that employees are fairly compensated is a better use of capital over time than simply banking money and/or returning it to shareholders. The idea that the cost of labor must be squeezed as much as possible to extract just that extra bit of profit is how we ended up with quiet quitting and lying flat. If companies want people to be motivated again: pay them. It is really that simple.

No more using workers

This is a story that most people under 50 know rather well. Most places have been understaffed for years and years. There are always promises to hire another person(s) and improve staffing, but it never seems to actually happen. People are tired of being used, abused, and all for low pay. Rather than labor under adverse conditions, people are “acting their wage” and simply not taking on extra work. Anyone who has worked in the service industry or elsewhere knows this story very well. It’s all over healthcare, too. Even in the well-heeled halls of corporate America, top performers are often loaded down with more work because they actually get things done. The days of workers being exploited by companies is coming to an end as workers have more power amid a labor shortage and also realize that letting their employers get away with exploitation does them no good.

Final Thoughts

This has been a long time in coming for employees and employers. The working class has been taking it on the chin for the past 40 years and people are finally standing up for themselves and demanding that their existing rights be enforced and demanding that these companies treat their people as well as the shareholders. It’s well past time to rebalance the economy and make sure that the people who are actually doing the work benefit from the fruits of the labor, and not just shareholders.