You Get What You Pay For

Please stop calling it "quiet quitting."

It's not quitting if you do exactly what you're being paid to do and not more. It's not quitting if you're disengaged from a job that doesn't engage you. What you're seeing called "quiet quitting" in countless news articles right now is really employees finally realizing that they were being exploited all along, that employers expect more for their money than they're willing to pay to get, that the culture of "work harder and longer to get ahead" wasn't really for their benefit.

Hello, radio industry. Any of this ring a bell?

For radio, this is the culmination of decades of loading too much work on too few people. There was always an element of it, especially at small stations where the PD was also the morning host and emergency fill-in and backup engineer and took out the trash as well, but it got a lot worse with consolidation, when you'd go from programming one station to being PD and operations manager for a seven-station cluster. Or it was voice-tracking for dozens of stations with little or no additional compensation. Sure, you could complain, but you'd be fired, and nobody wanted to lose their glamour employment. Or you could suck it up because there wasn't a Plan B in sight and you needed to pay the bills.

You could always console yourself with the idea that you were just "paying your dues" like everyone who came before you, working your way up the ladder from intern to small market to medium market to big market, the Shangri-La where things would be easier and you'd work short hours, have a limo take you to and from work, and be showered with money and praise.

Yeah, it didn't quite work that way, but, hey, show business, amirite? Worth the pain, worth the lower than anticipated pay, worth bouncing from market to market, worth the long hours and multiple jobs and living on a knife's edge with each ratings book.

Now, it's different. Radio isn't as glamorous as it was in the Golden Age, whenever that was. It's just another job, and, frankly, it's a lot of work for diminishing returns. There isn't a wave of new, eager entrants just begging for a chance to mop floors and be subjected to on-air abuse by the morning guy just to maybe someday be able to crack the golden mic. That was when we were kids. This is a new era, when those eager kids can shoot a 20-second video on their phones, stick it on TikTok, and get international attention.

Meanwhile, radio has painted itself into a corner. The business model is built on having fewer people doing more work for less pay, and it seems like the executives and investors assumed that the peasants wouldn't revolt. The more layoffs that occur, the worse it gets for the survivors. And if those survivors get wise, well, so much for the business plan.

Where do we go from here? For the big groups, I kinda think we're already there: national shows and formats, local staffs down to a skeleton crew. Smaller groups and mom-and-pops (any of those left?) may avoid that part, but they'll still have to convince new generations of prospects that there's a future in radio. You can't do that without paying people what they're worth for a reasonable amount of work, not what makes sense to your business plan.

That's the problem. The business plan depended on unreasonable expectations, and when the job market changed and the pandemic led to people finally realizing that a work-life balance wasn't just a theory but something they could actually achieve, it was time for entire industries to go back to the drawing board and come up with a better business plan. I don't see the radio industry racing to do that -- declaring yourself a "digital-first" company or an "audio company" or a "podcasting studio" will only go so far -- and I don't see anyone truly recognizing the real issue here, which is that your business cannot depend long term on squeezing more work out of your employees for inadequate compensation when they have other options.

And, now, in the age of the Great Resignation, they do. If the radio industry really wants to have a future, it should remember that its business is built on the people who work for it. Treat them poorly, pay them poorly, make their working conditions poor and you should expect what you get. And if you expect more from those workers, you're probably calling them "quiet quitters."

But that's a misnomer. The workers are just realizing what they and their work are worth. They aren't quitting. Radio shouldn't quit on them, either.

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Football season is back, so you'll get to measure my mood in these columns by whether the Eagles won the previous game. (My sour mood this week is unrelated to that -- preseason doesn't count.) Go Birds. No, I don't want to join your fantasy league.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon