American workers feel alienated, helpless and overwhelmed – here’s one way to alleviate their malaise

  First it was the “Great Resignation.” Then it was “nobody wants to work anymore.” Now it’s “quiet quitting.”

  Yet it seems like no one wants to talk about what I see as the root cause of America’s economic malaise – work under contemporary capitalism is fundamentally flawed.

  As a political philosopher studying the effects of contemporary capitalism on the future of work, I believe that the inability to dictate and meaningfully control one’s own working life is the problem.

  Democratizing work is the solution.

Quiet quitting and the great resignation have a common cause – dissatisfied workers feel they can’t speak up in the workplace

  U.S. workers have been at the forefront of three big trends in recent months.

  First, there was the “great resignation,” in which record numbers of workers were quitting their jobs. That coincided with a flurry of unionizing efforts at major U.S. companies, including Starbucks and Apple. Most recently, you’ve probably heard about “quiet quitting,” an often-misunderstood phrase that can mean either doing your job’s bare minimum or just not striving to overachieve.