Precarious Workers’ Wellbeing: Identity Development Through Online Discourses of Quiet Quitting

Workers’ identities are constructed for a significant part around their social positioning at work. However, the identity construction of workers has come under pressure because work has become increasingly precarious, due to less secure, short-term and more flexible employment arrangements. As a consequence, worker identity itself has become more unstable, as organizations provide fewer cultural resources for workers’ identity development. Precariousness thus constitutes a challenge with many consequences to workers’ sense of self and subsequent experiences of wellbeing. Confronted with fewer cultural resources, workers may seek to construct alternative workplace identities through the mobilization of online discourses. Building on an inductive qualitative study of approximately 34,000 items of the internet forum Reddit, we examine precarious workers’ processes of identity construction through online discourses of quiet quitting. This examination of the construction of a more or less collective worker identity provides several contributions. It emphasizes workers’ resilience in coping with their precariousness through online identity workspaces. In particular, it demonstrates that workers can develop these online identity workspaces in spontaneous and self-organized ways to construct meaningful identities and, in the process, detach from the workplace as an important site for identity construction. Consequently, we argue that, in their attempts to regain a sense of control over an increasingly precarious position, workers may divert to online fora, which offer the resources for the collective construction of a more desirable “precarious worker” identity.