Hating Your Job Is Cool. But Is It a Labor Movement?

Alec Wetherington didn’t know anyone in Portland, Ore., when he moved there in late 2020. His friends were in Seattle, his mother in Idaho, and he was lonely, so he started spending more time on Reddit. He found like-minded people on subreddit pages such as r/lostgeneration, r/millennials and r/exChristian. There was a certain amount of drama and trolling, but in general the posters were intellectual, thoughtful, young, a little radical — a lot like Wetherington. Reddit, for him, was a bit like an echo chamber and a bit like a group chat with friends. Time online was time spent socializing. It was surprisingly refreshing company for someone in a strange city.

Among the similarities he shared with his Reddit friends (and his offline friends too): indebtedness. In 2006, Wetherington took out more than $30,000 in student loans, and in subsequent years, because he wasn’t earning enough to make payments, he requested forbearance. The loan companies were always quick to extend it to him — “like candy,” he says. He didn’t understand the effect that deferring these payments would have on the money he owed, however, which was to capitalize the interest, increasing his debt. Nearly a decade after taking out his original loans, he had repaid about $17,000 yet owed more than the original loans. He regretted his degree. His English major and theology minor went unused, except in conversations with friends. And on Reddit.

It was the spring of 2021 when Wetherington started seeing posts from a subreddit called r/antiwork, whose motto was “Unemployment for all, not just the rich.” It had a couple of hundred thousand members, and stories from the community were popping up all over social media. (On Reddit, subreddits are called “communities”; their participants are known as “members.”) People wrote posts about poor treatment from bosses, about quitting their jobs.

“Where you at,” asks Chris, a boss, in a screenshot of one exchange of text messages posted on Antiwork.

“?” the worker responds.

“You told mark you could work night shift tonight.”

“No I did not. I told mark I couldn’t work monday.”

“You told him you couldn’t work in the morning but you could work normal hours.”

“As you know, I found out yesterday that my dad passed away. I’m gonna go ahead and at least take the one day I get a week off to mourn his death. I am so sorry for any inconvenience this will cause you.”

“My uncle died a few days ago. I lost my grandma. Stop being a victim.”

“Mail me my check. I quit. And go [expletive] yourself.”

This conversation appeared in a post with the heading “Who’s the boss now?” in the fall of 2021. It earned 176,000 upvotes. By this point, the group had around 500,000 members.

Wetherington did not find the Antiwork mind-set fully convincing. He was working as a senior account executive at a transcription company, the latest in a long line of part- and full-time jobs going back to high school: at a video-production company, a Panera, a Noodles & Company, school cafeterias. He didn’t see how stopping work altogether — whatever that even meant — was possible or desirable. He had bills. The transcription work was dull, but the pay was good and seemed as if it would keep climbing. In 2019, five years after he was hired, Wetherington was making more than $22 an hour. He did not get a raise in 2020, but he felt lucky to have a job when the pandemic hit, one that he could do full time from home.

As Antiwork grew, Wetherington saw that the community wasn’t just complaining about mean bosses. At least as much energy seemed to be devoted to discussions about improving pay and working conditions. Plans for protests would be made on Antiwork; then, three days later, they could be seen taking place on YouTube. The percentage of employed people who quit their jobs had increased sharply in the summer of 2020, but by the fall the quit rate was higher than it had been in two decades. It kept rising in 2021, and by the end of last summer it reached 3 percent. In May 2021, Anthony Klotz, a professor at Mays Business School, coined a term for this trend: the Great Resignation. Wetherington could see it happening among those of his friends who were quitting their jobs. In Antiwork, it seemed that a force was emerging — a community of people, mainly low-wage and blue-collar workers, fed up with their working conditions. By September, Wetherington had joined.

Doreen Ford, who became a member of Antiwork in 2014, the year after its creation, didn’t take the community too seriously in the beginning. It was just a handful of people hanging out online, sharing articles, ideas and jokes about work. One early post: “Friends Without Benefits: It is not enough to love your employer — you must love all employers.” But when I spoke to her in November, two days after thousands of McDonald’s employees around the United States walked out to push for better working conditions, Ford said that her biggest concern — by now she was Antiwork’s longest-serving moderator — was figuring out how to turn the group’s increasingly chaotic spirit into action. “We can see that people are angry,” she said. “They feel dejected and want somewhere to put their energy — what are we going to do with this?”

The most popular post in the Antiwork community at the time encouraged people to turn the McDonald’s strike into an even larger general strike — to force the company to pay its employees $25 an hour. When I asked the poster, who wanted to remain anonymous, what he hoped would happen in response to his post’s popularity, he brought up GameStop, whose stock price soared in early 2021 almost entirely thanks to a Reddit community called r/wallstreetbets. He said he wanted to bring that same power to labor rights. Soon after his post, he created and shared on Antiwork a sign with the slogan “McDonald’s Employment Boycott” above an image of a worker swinging a hammer. People started printing it out and taping it up in fast-food franchises. By that point, the group had more than 1.2 million members.

At the top of the subreddit page, Ford regularly pinned a general discussion thread in which members shared stories and memes, vented and planned action. Comments often took on a confessional tone. “My unemployment will run out in like a month,” one user said in a fall discussion thread. “It has been great not having to sell myself to live, but I’m becoming anxious at the thought of having to work again.” Another wrote: “I’m starting to panic. Can anyone help? I cannot make myself work anymore. I have a mental block against it. If I lose my job, my whole life will fall apart. But I just can’t bring myself to log in and do it.” To this, someone responded: “Idk but if I was in your place I’d save as much as possible and start looking for something easier to do.”

As I spent more time on Antiwork, it became clear that workers in the group weren’t impulsively quitting their jobs so much as navigating various entangled personal decisions. T., a 25-year-old machinist’s mate in the Navy who requested anonymity because he feared retribution, told me that while Antiwork provided a kind of fellowship with others who, like him, endured abuse at the hands of superiors, he worried about leaving the military when his six-year contract is up in the middle of this year. Antiwork sometimes makes quitting seem simpler than it really is, he noted. “The younger me would’ve, but I just had a kid,” he said, “and the dynamic has changed for me.”

In December, Antiwork had more than 1.4 million members and was consistently among the five busiest pages on Reddit, with daily averages of about 1,500 posts and 30,000 comments. Ford is a student, a part-time dog walker and an anarchist, but there are also communists, libertarians, mechanics, cashiers, teachers and government employees. In speaking to dozens of people in the community, I found what seems to be a general solidarity under its variegated surface, beyond the resignation sagas and the efforts to organize. But whether this community has wrought change in the analog world is harder to say: Antiwork straddles the already fuzzy line between the internet and offline life.

By the end of 2021, Wetherington was on Antiwork more often, convinced that it would play an important role in the next phase of the Great Resignation. But he couldn’t help noticing that the efforts to initiate strikes were fizzling out. The user who tried to start the McDonald’s strike went silent about it a couple of weeks after his first post went viral; pictures of his sign stopped showing up online. He was too swamped at his own job to do anything more, he told me.

The lasting impact of Antiwork has seemed to fall largely on the psyches of individual members. “What would you do if you didn’t have to work full time to survive?” one popular post asked. The responses that followed — there were more than 4,000 — included things like painting, growing a garden and sitting in cafes. A number of people said that they had already cut back on their workdays. “Those extra hours have made a huge difference in my mental health and time I dedicate to my personal life,” one said. Someone else echoed the sentiment: “This is what I did too and worth it completely! Life is too short to be exhausted for most of it.” Another person answered: “I would transform my semi truck into a ‘free’ crepe shop. I’d drive it here and there, stop in a parking lot, make crepes for an afternoon and then bugger off home.” To this, someone responded: “Marry me.”

For the members I spoke to, it was nice to be part of a community. Troy Simoes, a 26-year-old lab manager in Colorado who first started browsing Antiwork after starting in his current job in 2020, told me that he found himself spending more time on the subreddit after his therapist suggested he try to make connections. “The fact that people are just kind of done working in jobs that they hate for nothing, I just found that relatable,” he said.

Wetherington’s own growing dissatisfaction with work peaked when he received no raise for a second year in a row. The day he found out, he started browsing online job listings. By now, he had fully embraced the Antiwork ethos. It took him less than a week to find a job in a factory that produces semiconductor-making machines. The entry-level position on the night shift promised to pay $6,900 more annually than he was making at the transcription company.

In early January, a day after he handed in his two-week notice, Wetherington told me that he felt bad about leaving his co-workers; all of them, he thinks, are good people. Although Antiwork helped inspire him, it didn’t lead him to submit a biting letter of resignation. His supervisor, who hired him seven years ago, was the first person he told that he was leaving. The two of them had become friends, and when they talked on the phone, he says, the supervisor was understanding and even a little impressed.

A week later, Doreen Ford was interviewed by Jesse Watters on Fox News. Ford appeared on a grainy video feed from her apartment, the light from her monitor reflecting off her glasses, obscuring her eyes. She spun back and forth in her chair throughout the three-minute interview. Watters, on her side of the screen, was calm and composed.

Watters: “You’re 30, OK. And is there something you want to do besides being a dog walker? Do you aspire to do anything more than dog walking, or is that kind of your pinnacle?”

Ford: “I love working with dogs. If I had to do this for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be super complaining. Dogs are wonderful animals. But I would love to teach, I would love to work with people and stuff like that. …”

Watters: “Teach. What would you teach, Doreen?”

Ford: “Philosophy, mostly.”

Watters: “Philosophy. …”

Ford: “Critical thinking, reason, stuff like that.”

Watters: “Well I would love to take your class, Doreen. I would just be taking notes the whole time.”

In the hours that followed, the Antiwork subreddit imploded. The interview was universally considered a disaster. The community questioned why Ford felt she had the authority to represent the movement. One especially popular comment: “1 person has, potentially I’d like to add, ruined what antiwork and the progress it has made, for 1.7 million people.”

Within 24 hours of the interview’s release, the entire subreddit was made private, and no one except the moderators could access it. Theories started to bounce around about some outside corporate mastermind controlling the moderators, trying to turn the community against itself.

In the days afterward, Ford told me that she agreed to do the interview in order to get some traction for the movement. “I had good intentions, but, yeah, that only does so much,” she said. People continued to harass her online, sending her graphic threats and insulting her appearance. It felt as if the world was collapsing in on her.

After Antiwork was closed to public access, a different page called r/WorkReform appeared. Its motto was “Food, Healthcare, and Homes: for ALL WAGES,” and it soon became the fastest-growing subreddit on the site. Within 12 hours it had 150,000 members; 12 hours later it had more than 400,000 members. One of the top posts read, “Regardless of anti works intention or your views on it we have to take this seriously. Going in front of the media and uttering the words anti work, people who don’t know WILL take it at face value and dismiss it. …All I want is a clear and shining light to the public that encapsulates the reality of the [expletive] world we live in when it comes to work.”

Then the Antiwork subreddit was reopened. All traces of Ford’s account had been erased from the community. Within a few days, posts about abusive bosses started to dominate the content again, and a couple of days later a post titled “Americas transgender wage gap” was pinned to the top of the page. WorkReform’s growth spurt slowed at around 450,000 members, and Antiwork’s numbers stayed around 1.7 million. Posts on both pages express the same frustrations, and both have been growing steadily.

When we were talking one evening after he started training for his new job, Wetherington told me that he didn’t really know where he fit into the Antiwork community anymore. He still felt a sense of solidarity with the other members, whether it was in Antiwork or WorkReform. He remained a member of both groups, but he wasn’t sure whether he belonged or if he was just an appreciative spectator. He believed in the community’s collective potential — after all, the group had helped persuade him to leave his job — but it was difficult to gauge how realistic it was to hope for a Reddit revolution. And now he liked his job. It paid well.

“When I say that I quit because of what’s called the Great Resignation, I wonder how much of that is created by the ‘movement’ on Reddit and stuff, or whether it’s just how the economy works,” he said. He decided not to post about himself in the Antiwork community. The situation, he thought, was too complicated for that.

Oliver Whang is a freelance journalist who studies philosophy at Princeton University.