(New York) — As the pandemic upends workplace routines and calls into question work as a lifestyle priority, trendy taglines such as ‘quiet retirement’ and ‘big resignation’ have become a threat to some. We understand employee dissatisfaction.
Now there is a new viral trend. It’s “Bear Minimum Monday”.
Marisa Jo, who has 154,000 followers on TikTok, unravels the anxiety-filled week preparation and ambitious exhaustion brought on by one day of overactivity on five straight workdays. I popularized the phrase in a series of posts criticizing it.
Instead, Jo encourages workers to work as little as possible on Mondays to restore energy and focus on other interests.
In a post last month, Joe said he lamented his previous approach to Mondays.
“I spent too long making to-do lists thinking I could accomplish a way out of stress, but I never did,” she said in the post. I started to wonder why as I was putting pressure on myself,” she added. “You knew it was time to do something new.”
The video has received 145,000 views and 18,000 likes. Another viral post from Joe on the topic generated 1.8 million views, Forbes reported.
“Bear Minimum Monday” marks the convergence of pandemic-era trends. With the rise of telecommuting, the lines between work and leisure are blurring, and a tight labor market is influencing employees and creators of social media content. The expert told ABC News that he has a wide audience complaining about workplace grievances.
Brooke Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell University who studies the impact of new technologies on work, told ABC News: “It’s not just being posted, it’s getting attention.”
With the job market booming despite high-profile layoffs at companies like Amazon and Twitter, a new tagline has emerged.
The unemployment rate fell to 3.4% last month, the lowest since 1969. Moreover, as of December, the economy had 11 million job openings, federal data this month showed.
When the labor market is tight, workers typically wield more influence over their employers because they have more freedom to look elsewhere for work, experts said.
On the other hand, some indicators of job dissatisfaction have also emerged.
Last year, unions reached their highest levels of support in the United States since 1965, according to a Gallup poll.
According to researchers at Cornell University, the number of workplace strikes in 2022 will increase by 52% compared to the previous year.
Meanwhile, Amazon and Starbucks workers surprised allies and foes last year with a landmark labor victory. Starbucks employees unionized at more than 260 stores last year, according to federal data.
“People have been annoyed with their jobs for a long time, but suddenly there is a lot of media attention to workers organizing and strikes, and many workers are going, ‘Oh, that could be. It’s better than putting up with this,” Ileen DeVault, a professor of labor history at Cornell University, told ABC News.
“It’s certainly tied to a tight labor market,” she added. “Workers are far more likely to quit their jobs than to be fired right now, and even making a fuss about them quitting will cause employers to panic.”
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