The Empire Strikes Back

Over the last few days I’ve been hearing stories (anecdotes, really) about a rapid scaling up of pressure on workers from a few separate and distinct corporate contexts. I also sat in a meeting this week in which a senior administrator described the early details of new systems of workplace management designed to ensure that faculty were doing a “fair” amount of work. Anecdotes though they are, when combined with the horrors of DOGE they feel like a concerted effort on the part of the employer class to recreate then reap the rewards of worker precarity.

The Silicon Valley Tech Bros have made clear their rage against the very idea that workers should be able to make any kind of demands about the nature and governance of their workplaces. Wage growth and the concomitant freedom of movement that this implies is, to their minds, at the core of worker rebelliousness. The idea that if workers get paid too much they get uppity is the clear line that links the Tech Bros to both the traditional corporate ownership class and to the petit bourgeois that runs rural America. Moreover, all of these groups (along with right-affiliated economists) have long felt that government employment serves to distort the labor market and unfairly increase the bargaining power of workers.

For these folks, wage growth and worker mobility are the source of other “problems.” Frustration with inflation during Covid was, as much as anything, frustration with an increase in the wages that other people get paid. Wage growth was one of the most important drivers of inflation and contributed to some of the more annoying trends of the period, including rising restaurant prices, increasingly large demands for gratuities, and the inability of businesses to keep workers on staff. The rising price of produce is linked to the higher wages that workers demand for picking fruits and vegetables.

These folks pay attention to one another; they talk in country clubs and follow the same newsletters and sometimes sit on the same corporate boards. They can see Elon tightening the screws on the government workforce and it makes them believe, even at this very early date in Trump 47, that they can tighten the screws on their own workforces. It won’t be long, after all, until the labor pool is a lot more liquid and much more favorable for employers, so why not cut out the bad wood now (the employees who don’t want to be screeched at while sitting in a pressure cooker) in anticipation of a much more desperate workforce in a few months.

I’m curious about other reports of a shift in management tactics in the last six weeks. Is this all just conjecture or is there something to it?