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.
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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?”
‘I’m starting to panic. Can anyone help? I cannot make myself work anymore.’
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.