The Disgruntled Employee: A History

American companies have been blaming workers for their own unhappiness since the late 1800s

L.D. Burnett
Index
Published in
7 min readMar 5, 2021

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Chefs walk out of the Ritz hotel in London to hear an address by Arthur Lewis MP after which they went on strike.
Photo: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty

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…

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L.D. Burnett
Index
Writer for

Writer and historian from / in California’s Great Central Valley. Book, “Western Civilization: The History of an American Idea,” under contract w/ UNC Press.