‘Quiet Quitting’ is a wake up call but it is not the solution

In the past months, I have read several articles, I have gone through several social media posts or I have even held discussions with friends over this new concept that is now surrounding the world of work: ‘Quiet Quitting’. As per this Business Standard’s article published earlier this month: “Quiet quitting is often confused with quitting the job altogether. But it’s not. It is defined as performing only the jobs assigned to an employee by the employer and not going above and beyond the job description (it therefore does not involve quitting)”

I must say, initially, when I first heard about the concept, I felt somehow satisfied with its existence and even more, with the fact that workers around the world were joining this ‘Quiet Quitting trend’ in their workplace. I attributed my joy to an economic phenomenon that I feel is often overlooked in the public discourse: the global decline in the labour share of income since the 1980s. To explain in detail, ‘labour income’ is the amount that employed people earn by working (our salary, in other words). Economists use this term to distinguish it from capital income which refers to the owners of assets – land, machines, buildings, patents, shares – who earn income through those. Thus, capital income comes from capital, which is to say, comes from wealth itself, unlike labour income it does not come from any specific production or direct work.

Still, the connection between my support towards an initiative such as ‘Quiet Quitting’ and the downward trend in the labour share of income might require further explanation. Maybe, I should have mentioned above that a decline in labour share of income in the past decades has been paired, contrariwise, with an increase in the share of capital income. But still, what does this mean? Research has proven that there is a relationship between increasing dividend and interest payments and the decline of the share of wages. Those whose income comes from capital through the possession of wealth (rental income, assets, dividend income, machine…) have been gaining a bigger part of the pie, while wage earners (most of us) have been getting a smaller and smaller part of the pie.

The pie has become bigger to due to an increase in productivity which has occurred mainly due to the 2 following factors:

• The impact of technology – rapid progress in automation processes, digitalisation, telecommunication and information influxes. 
• Global integration/globalisation – increase in global trade, participation in global value chains and an increase in foreign investment.