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.
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“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.”
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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
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