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

Gerben Wortelboer and Martijn Pieter Van der Steen zoom in on the well-being of precarious workers. They explain that 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. Building on an inductive qualitative study of approximately 34,000 items of the Internet forum Reddit, these authors examine precarious workers’ processes of identity construction through online discourses of quiet quitting. This examination emphasizes workers’ resilience in coping with their precariousness through online identity workspaces and 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.