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The Disgruntled Employee: A History
American companies have been blaming workers for their own unhappiness since the late 1800s
What exactly is a disgruntled employee? Is that a bad thing?
Corporations or organizations frequently use the term to explain away workers’ allegations of employer malfeasance. We’ve all heard things like, “This complaint doesn’t reflect our company culture; this is a controversy cooked up by a few disgruntled employees. Our workers are overwhelmingly happy with their jobs, their working conditions, and their pay. We know, because we ask them if they’re happy, and they assure us that they are.”
Even if they don’t use those exact words, employers have often tried to deflect accusations of harmful behavior by dismissing the complainant as a “disgruntled employee” — as if the employee’s working conditions had nothing to do with their disgruntlement.
In any case, the moniker “disgruntled employee” carries considerable weight in our business-minded culture: Amazon recently framed its workers’ protests as the “acts of a few disgruntled employees;” business magazines have warned that “disgruntled employees can destroy your company culture”; and last year, even the White House dismissed scathing criticism from ex-officials as the grousing of “disgruntled employees.” It is a pejorative term in our discourse. But what’s the history behind the phrase? When and how did it come to signal an unjustly unhappy laborer?
There’s no example of a boss who “disgruntles” their workers. Instead, the disgruntled appear in literature, already aggrieved, already sulky, and only context can help us understand the source of their discontent.
The first known use of the term “disgruntled” dates back to the 1680s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. To “disgruntle” someone, it says, is, “to put [them] into sulky dissatisfaction or ill-humor; to chagrin, disgust.” However, the dictionary provides no example of that verb in common usage. In other words, there is no textual instance — or at least none cited — of one person disgruntling another. There’s no example of a boss…
