‘Bare minimum Monday’ marks latest quiet quitting trend

Buzzwords like “Quiet Quitting” and “Great Resignation” have caused frustration for some employees as the pandemic has upended their work routines and challenged work as a lifestyle priority.

Now there’s a new viral trend: “Bare minimum Monday”.

Marisa Jo, who has 154,000 followers on TikTok, popularized the phrase with a series of posts criticizing the anxious preparation for the workweek and ambition-driven exhaustion caused by overactivity on the first of five straight days at work.

Instead, Jo encourages workers to do as little as possible at work on Mondays, restoring their energy and focusing on other interests.

In a post last month, Jo said she regretted her earlier approach to Mondays.

“You would create way too long a to-do list because you thought you could overachieve your way out of stress — but you never did,” she said in the post. “You’ve always put yourself under more pressure than any boss, so you’ve wondered why,” she added. “You knew it was time for something new.”

This video received 145,000 views and 18,000 likes. A separate viral post by Jo on the subject garnered 1.8 million views, Forbes reported.

“Bare Minimum Monday” marks a convergence of pandemic-era trends: a blurring of the line between work and free time amid the rise of working from home, a tight job market as employees and social media content creators have found a Leverage has created a wide audience for workplace frustration, experts told ABC News.

“It’s a perfect storm of the kind of expression and discontent that we’re seeing very publicly on these platforms,” ​​Brooke Duffy, a Cornell University professor of communications who studies the impact of new technologies on work, told ABC News. “It’s not just being posted, it’s gaining traction.”

The new buzzword has emerged as the job market is booming despite high-profile layoffs at companies like Amazon and Twitter.

The unemployment rate last month fell to 3.4%, the lowest since 1969. Also, the economy had 11 million job vacancies in December, federal data for the month showed.

In a tight labor market, workers tend to exert greater influence over an employer because they have more leeway to look elsewhere, experts say.

Some indicators of job dissatisfaction have now emerged.

According to a Gallup poll last year, unions in the US achieved their highest approval rating since 1965.

The number of strikes at work increased by 52% in 2022 compared to the previous year, researchers at Cornell University found.

Meanwhile, workers at Amazon and Starbucks amazed allies and adversaries alike over the past year by scoring landmark labor victories. Starbucks workers unionized at more than 260 stores last year, according to federal data.

“People have long fretted about their jobs, and now suddenly there’s a lot of media attention for workers’ organizing and strikes, and it’s got a lot of workers saying, ‘Oh dear, maybe it would be better for me that way ‘than deal with it,'” Ileen DeVault, a professor of labor history at Cornell University, told ABC News.

“It’s certainly related to the tight job market,” she added. “Workers are much more likely to quit than fire right now, and their employers will panic if they make any noise at all that they’re quitting.”