The Devil Wears Prada, a 2006 box-office hit adapted from Lauren Weisberger’s best-seller, is the story of Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), an earnest reporter trying to break into New York journalism. Eventually she takes an entry-level job as a personal assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the Anna Wintour-ish editor of Runway, a Vogue-ish fashion bible. Miranda runs her assistants and everyone else ragged with evermore unreasonable demands.

One morning she gives Andy four hours to bring her a steak from Smith & Wollensky, a piping hot latte from Starbucks, and a copy of the new Harry Potter book. Not the one in bookstores: the unpublished manuscript for the next book, the one only JK Rowling and her publisher have copies of. Andy wants to quit but a reference from Miranda would open doors for her at major newspapers. Besides, everyone keeps telling her: ‘a million girls would kill for this job.’

It’s a work culture millennials and zillennials will readily recognise. Sure, most have never been asked to procure Donatella Versace’s private jet to airlift their boss out of Miami in the middle of a hurricane, but stagnant pay, ever-extending work hours, unreasonable demands, and limited opportunities for career progression are familiar features of 21st century working life. The proles, ingrates that they are, are apparently losing patience with this arrangement and have begun ‘quiet quitting’. The Times defines this as ‘a movement of workers who are embracing doing the bare minimum to avoid being fired and coasting through their jobs without mentally committing’ and ‘rejecting the idea that work has to take over your life’.

Naturally, everyone is putting their spin on it. The Daily Express served up the ‘snowflakes, amirite?’ take. Quiet quitting was ‘just another excuse to be lazy and to moan about your lot in life’. The Independent took the ‘yas, kween, slay!’ girlboss feminism angle, objecting that ‘loads of white, middle-aged and over blokes’ have been ‘wise to this wheeze for decades’. Industry magazine People Management published a feature entitled ‘Quiet quitting: how should HR manage it?’ The way HR manages most things, I’d imagine: hold a meeting in which a thirty-something sociopath called Emily responds to every grievance with, ‘Let’s circle back and unpack that later’.

With the greatest of respect to desperate commissioning editors, and with apologies to Regina George: Stop trying to make ‘quiet quitting’ happen. It’s not going to happen. There’s already a name for the arrangement whereby you perform only contracted duties in exchange for a salary. It’s called ‘employment’. What we’re talking about here is workers being exploited and feeling frustrated about it. That’s not new, either. It’s what led Marx to say, ‘External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification’, and what led Homer Simpson to say, ‘If you don’t like your job, you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.’

Young employees aren’t entitled. They’re not snowflakes. They’re not too woke to work. They’re disillusioned and it’s because they are better acquainted with today’s labour market than their critics. It’s not the Eighties anymore. You can’t graft your way to an ex-council house, uPVC windows, a Ford Escort and two weeks on the Costa Brava. You can’t go in at the bottom and work your way to the top. Men born in the late 1980s were at least twice as likely to begin their careers in low-paid jobs than those born in the 1970s. They have also climbed the ladder more slowly. Women born in the late Eighties started their careers at the same level of the labour market as those born in the Sixties.

Millennials are the first generation to be worse off financially than the generation that preceded them, registering a median wealth in their thirties that is 20 per cent lower than Gen-Xers at the same point. In 1989, 51 per cent of young families owned their own home; in 2019, it was 28 per cent. What happened? Did we splurge the mortgage money on avocado toast? No, we just had the misfortune of being born when we were. In 1997, the median house price was 3.5 times median earnings; in 2021, it was 9.1 times. To make matters worse, average wages fell this year at the fastest rate since 2001.

If some young workers are engaging in an undeclared work-to-rule, my only question is: why only some? If you still arrive at work early and leave late, without extra pay or time off, you’re a chump. If you still haven’t figured out that you can’t pay your rent with clap emojis on Slack from your line manager, you’re a sucker. If you still don’t understand that the system is rigged against you, you really need to wise up.

Do you think your company cares about you? Do you think going above and beyond for people who don’t know your name is going to save your job come the next round of outsourcing to New Delhi? Do you think your employer goes above and beyond for you?

Here’s what you do: Turn up on time. Do your job. Do it right. Do whatever is asked of you provided it’s lawful, reasonable and within your contract. Do not one thing more than that. Hard work is a virtue. Allowing yourself to be exploited is the functional equivalent of walking around with a ‘kick me’ sign stuck to your back. It’s not virtuous, it’s self-debasing.

Why should you debase yourself to prop up the economy of a country that hates you? That taxes you to pay for the social care of wealthy pensioners. That makes you fund the retirements of baby boomers with a state pension you’ll likely never see. That allows Nimbys to choke off the housing supply so that you might never be able to afford your own home. You think the answer to all this is ‘quiet quitting’? Have you considered quiet Bolshevik revolution?

None of this applies if you truly do have a role that a million girls would kill for, if you love your job and it fulfils you and you work for a company that treats its employees right. But most of you don’t. So do your job and no more. Clock in, clock out, and let your boss get her own damn Harry Potter book.