It always awakens a sleeping sense of wonder when some basic assumption about history is upended or pushed back thousands of years. It’s like finding out the dinosaurs had feathers all over again: it opens up something you thought was set in stone and so you have to engage with it anew all over again, with new eyes.
“The reality is workers have long been going ‘above and beyond’ and not getting paid for it.”
That’s
the argument put forth Friday by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a
progressive think tank with a long track record of popularizing
research on wage suppression and runaway inequality.
“Everyone’s
obsessed with a post-pandemic phenomenon called ‘quiet quitting,’” EPI
wrote in an email. “It’s basically defined as workers just doing the
basic requirements of their jobs and not going ‘above and beyond.’”
“But the reality is workers have long been going ‘above and beyond’ and
not getting paid for it,” EPI continued. “We’re calling this phenomenon
‘quiet fleecing.’”
