Once, when I was around 21, I had an eye-opening conversation over lunch with someone who had worked for years in managerial positions at charities. While my mind was occupied with graduate opportunities and starting salaries, his was elsewhere. “There are some people we probably don’t need anymore,” he said of his organisation as we discussed how our respective work lives were going. Did he mean their contracts were up, I naively asked? No, he said. “But there are things you can do to make people move on.”
I wasn’t completely sure what he meant at the time, and I didn’t ask — probably because I knew on some level that I wouldn’t like the answer. But in the almost-decade since, I’ve become familiar with this particular dirty little secret that that particular boss had no problem sharing: workers are forced all the time to leave jobs against their will as a result of behaviours or actions that happen or are allowed to happen so that a job becomes untenable. Labour law has a name for this scenario: constructive dismissal. Naturally, TikTok has one too: ‘quiet firing’.
Hot on the heels of ‘quiet quitting’, the ‘quiet firing’ hashtag boasts tens of millions of views on TikTok and endless posts to scroll through. In most, someone — sometimes a ‘job coach’ or ‘work-life influencer’ — runs through the signs: your manager changes their behaviour towards you or they tolerate poor behaviour from your colleagues towards you; your shift patterns or tasks are altered unreasonably;...
It’s over now, but something has to be said. It’s over. The strange saga of Lieutenant Governor Dale Caldwell that was kept from the public until NJ Globe’s David Wildstein broke the story. For mo...