


In 2021, members of r/antiwork called for "Blackout Black Friday." While originally a general strike on Black Friday, it morphed into a consumer boycott. On January 26, r/antiwork was the subreddit with the highest increase of traffic that was not one of Reddit's "default" front page subreddits. By December 2021 that number had grown to 1.4 million, and in January 2022 it was over 1.7 million. In November 2021 the subscriber number exceeded one million. The subreddit's popularity increased after people began posting text messages of employees giving notice to their employers that they no longer wanted their jobs.

In 2019, the number of subscribers was 13,000, which increased to 100,000 in early 2020. Remote workers began sharing various mouse jiggler strategies to combat bossware intended to monitor the productivity of employees. R/antiwork began growing rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic as millions of people were laid off from their jobs or made to work reduced hours. As of 2021, she earns a living through dog walking, pet sitting, and through crowdfunding on her Patreon. In 2017, Ford quit working in retail to work with animals, mainly dogs, on the advice of her grandmother.
#Reddit work clock more hours series
Until 2017, Ford worked at a series of retail jobs for a decade, which she described as "miserable". In 2014, Ford was writing a blog called. Its early years were shaped by Doreen Ford, a moderator on the subreddit since 2013. R/antiwork was created in 2013 as a forum for discussion of anti-work thought within post-left anarchism. The interview was overwhelmingly criticized on Reddit and other social media platforms, which prompted the subreddit to shut down temporarily. On January 25, 2022, one of the subreddit's moderators, Doreen Ford, participated in an interview with Fox News anchor Jesse Watters.

However, following its rapid growth, the subreddit has come to represent a broader tent of left-wing politics centered on discussion of working conditions and labor activism. The subreddit was originally founded as a forum for discussion of anti-work ideology within post-left anarchism. r/antiwork has been compared to the Occupy Wall Street movement due to the subreddit's intellectual foundations and decentralized ethos. It is often associated with other ideologically similar subreddits such as r/latestagecapitalism. The popularity of r/antiwork increased in 20, and the subreddit gained 900,000 subscribers in 2021 alone, accumulating nearly 1,700,000 subscribers by the end of the year. Various actions that have been promoted on the subreddit include a consumer boycott of Black Friday as well as the submission of fake jobs applications to the Kellogg Company after the company announced plans to replace 1,400 striking workers during the 2021 Kellogg's strike. The forum's slogan reads: "Unemployment for all, not just the rich!" Posts on the forum commonly describe employees' negative experiences at work, dissatisfaction with working conditions, and unionization. R/antiwork is a subreddit associated with contemporary labor movements, critique of work, and the anti-work movement.
