claimed it resonated with a growing silent majority of youth disillusioned by the officially endorsed "Chinese Dream" that encourages a life of hard work and sacrifice with no actual life satisfaction to show for it. The phrase, "quiet quitting," became popular during 2022 in the United States, mostly through the social video platform TikTok. In 2022, quiet quitting experienced a surge in popularity in numerous publications following a viral TikTok video which was inspired by a Business Insider article. That same year, Gallup found that roughly half of the U.S. workforce were quiet quitters. The Coronavirus pandemic sparked the movement of quiet quitting even more as gen Z would be doing the work according to how it is outlined in their contract. Response While individual contributors might think in terms of otherwise "engaged workers setting reasonable boundaries", their employers might see them instead as "slackers who are willfully underperforming". Sometimes work-to-rule can be considered by employers as malicious compliance as they pursue legal action against workers. While not legally enforceable under minimum statutory law, employers may enforce customized employment contract terms that the employee agreed to: Overtime is waived in part, in whole, or converted to time-in-lieu Breaks are set by management Job description includes "ad-hoc task" or "as assigned" Termination for any reason They may also take standard forms of action especially where custom terms were not negotiated during the offer: Warning and noting employee file for professional misconduct or insubordination Reassigning employee to insignificant, routine, or mundane tasks The opposite of 'quiet quitting' is 'quiet firing', in which an employer deliberately offers only a minimum wage and benefits and denies any advances in the hope that an unwanted employee would quit. The phrase could also mean employers reducing the scope of a worker's responsibilities to encourage them to quit voluntarily. "Quiet hiring" is another term that has been used to describe a strategy by employers to give additional responsibilities and unpaid extra workload to hard-working employees. Examples Cases of work-to-rule have included UK postal workers normally arrived an hour before their official start time, did unpaid overtime at the end of deliveries, used their own (uninsured) cars for deliveries, and carried mailbags too heavy by health and safety guidelines. During a dispute they arrived at start time, stopped deliveries at the end of their allotted shift, only used official vans, and weighed mailbags to keep within the limit.