When Elana* used to do overnight stays in her nannying job, there was one particularly wealthy mother who would request that she sleep on a tiny, hard sofa downstairs in the kitchen, next to the cat litter. Just to make sure Elana didn’t develop any delusions of grandeur, the mother also locked her bedroom when she went away on business, so Elana had no choice but to sleep in her servant’s quarters-style makeshift bed.
Then, one day, Elana decided she was done. She found the hidden key, slept overnight in the mother’s bed, and left it unmade the next day for when she returned home. “I never looked back,” Elana said.
What Elana did that day is something we’re now calling “loud quitting”, and she’s not alone in her behaviour. According to a new report from Gallup of more than 120,000 global employees, nearly one in five workers are “loudly quitting” or actively disengaged from their jobs. While quiet quitting, a term coined in 2022, was considered a “personal rejection of hustle culture”, loud quitting is where employees do not go gentle into that good night. Gallup defines loud quitters as employees who take actions to “directly harm” the organisation they work for, while undercutting its goals and opposing its leaders.
This is something 29-year-old serial loud-quitter Ré Poko knows all too well. “I’m very up front in terms of being like ‘This is s***,’” Ré explains. “It’s not something I do when I’ve outgrown the role or if I’m at odds with the company’s direction — that’s not cause for me to be disengaged. It’s when you’ve been mistreated, let down, or led astray by a company. And then I’ve been very vocal, making my feelings known both amongst my colleagues and in the industry.”
In his loud quitting days, Ré also pulled the brakes on any kind of “extra mile” work commitments. After one previous employer changed his job role and escalated his responsibilities multiple times, with no reflection in pay, Ré fought back. “I was very capped. The effort I put in was very limited. If we had work on the weekend, I was like, ‘I’m not going unless you get me a cab from my house to the location, then from the location back to my house.’ So ultimately I was able to be an inconvenience to the company in that way, becoming a financial burden. Because if it comes to [whether me or] the company pays for it, they’re gonna pay for it.”
In another instance, Ré got into an argument in a private room with a member of senior management over what he calls “the diversity, or lack of diversity, of talent they were bringing in” which led to Ré wanting to hand in his notice. Instead of doing this in a private office, removed from his colleagues, he decided to have his resignation conversation with HR in the open-plan office where people could hear. “I wasn’t shouting,” he says, “but it was very much me detailing all the things I thought were very bad about the company, then proceeding to take my wireless keyboard and leave.”
Perhaps the most notable loud quitter of modern times is Joey DeFrancesco, who in 2011 brought a whole marching band with him to hand in his resignation at his hotel job and documented it on YouTube. Speaking to the camera, Joey says: “I’ve worked in this hotel for three-and-a-half years, they treat us like s*** here, I’m going to go and quit right now with the help of my bandmates in the What Cheer brigade.” The video has racked up more than 8.9 million views and 188,000 likes. One of the top comments, says: “They should be available for hire as a professional quitting service.”
Other loud quitters we spoke to for this piece include: a school teacher who left after she was told she couldn’t do anything to help with LGBTQ+ inclusion at her school, so she set up an optional queer youth club anyway and ran it in the weeks before she left, and a barista who was treated so badly he quit and returned weeks later to the coffee shop just to inform all the new staff that they were probably never going to get paid (”And they weren’t,” he said).
Of course, loud quitting is a viral new term to describe something that’s been going on for centuries. When the French got tired of their King’s extravagant spending, threw down their tools and raised their pitchforks for the storming of the Bastille, we didn’t call it “loud quitting”. Ré’s description of pulling the brakes is actually a striking technique called work-to-rule.
The sudden increase in loud quitting at the same time our country is undergoing substantial industrial action is not a coincidence. We may be a couple of coups short of a revolution, but quiet quitting turning to loud quitting does imply that something is changing, evolving, escalating.
People are fed up. This week alone, discourse swirled over on X (neé Twitter) as people revealed they were unenrolling from their pensions in a bid to gain more disposable income. But new figures from Senior Capital show that already 18 per cent of people don’t have enough money in their pensions to upkeep their quality of life. When everything is looking this futile, quiet quitting just ain’t gonna cut it.
“I feel like Gen Z are becoming more sick of the status quo and the way things are,” Ré says. “I think it’s only going to increase — the main issue is that at the moment we’ve got a lot of millennials and older people running these organisations in a way that leads to this dissatisfaction or loud quitting.”
Unless things change, he predicts, there is more loud quitting to come. “I don’t think the generations that are coming [up in the workplace] now give too much of a damn about the sort of approach that is expected of them. I think they’re like, nah, this is rubbish, I’m not dealing with it, and I kinda respect that.”
