It’s finally happening: Elon is bringing economic rationality to Twitter, the company he just took over under very high pressure to amp up cash flow in the midst of a stagflationary environment. It’s no easy task but it certainly begins with cost cutting. First on the chopping block: the labor pool itself. Half the workers will be gone by the close of business Nov. 4, 2022.
Consider the irony. These one-time essential workers are now discovering that they are nonessential to the operations of the company. They will soon hit the job market at a huge disadvantage. The tech sector is melting in its financials and nearly all have either hiring freezes or large cuts coming. The laptoppers who exercised immense power for two years, deciding who could and could not speak and what can and cannot be said, suddenly find themselves out of a job.
Let’s think back to 31 months ago when this mess all began. It was certainly the most bizarre moment in the history of the American labor force. On March 16, 2020, and following, every public health agency in the country was sent a document from the CDC and invited to put their own stamp on it. This document was in turn sent to every city and county and then every HR department of every major business. It was then distributed to operations managers and throughout the company. It filtered down to small businesses.
In a flash, the entire American workforce was divided between essential and nonessential. Who decides? Government. Essential included health-care workers, infrastructure employees (people who keep the lights on and the water running), grocery store workers and delivery services, and media was included in that list along with digital educational companies and software.
Nonessential was everyone else. That’s an amazing word really. It’s about the whole of society: we don’t need you. This is dehumanizing and also flies in the face of hundreds of years of scholarship on how labor markets work. No worker is unessential in a complex commercial society. Each contributes to the whole. It is impossible to divide it up or slice and dice people and their value to society.
Everyone scoured the documents to find out if their own business could operate, and, if so, whether this person or that person could justify continuing to work. It was a strange edict because we were left to guess about the specific application of the new rules much less how they would be enforced. Would the cops come? Health agencies? The mayor’s office?
It was all unclear. And what would be the penalties for disobedience? Are we talking about civil fines or criminal indictment? Could people really be dragged off to jail for cutting hair or painting someone’s nails or selling a tomato from a stand at a farmer’s market? Could we mow lawns, cut trees, serve beer, host a meeting, and so on? No one knew.
This document was an early sign: we were suddenly operating according to some kind of central plan, one we might associate with martial law or a wartime footing in which government is wholly in charge of everything. Such a system is the opposite of everything America is about. It seemed impossible, and unconscionable, and yet it was happening.
The “essential” category included not only people who actually go to work but also millions of white-collar laptoppers who could do their jobs from home. And so they did. And many liked this very much. It continued through the year and into the next. Many office workers are only now going back into the office though they were declared to be essential by government early on.
As for the nonessential, if they could not do their jobs from the laptop, they were left with nothing to do. They turned to drink, drugs, and surfing the internet for endless hours, devouring movies that made Netflix rich and ordering in groceries and products from Amazon. Most businesses had to close, especially small ones because they were called nonessential.
This division immediately imposed a form of feudalism. There was one class that was entitled to work and another that was not. The decider was some agency out there that never previously possessed much less exercised such totalitarian authority. Where you wanted to be in the new pecking order was essential but able to do all your work from home.
What you did not want to be was nonessential and unable to make a living any other way but going to work. I had a friend who became a very successful server at a popular restaurant in town. Life was good. About a month before the great March 2020 disaster struck, he was poached by a software company to do database work. He worried about giving up a good job he liked for one in which he was not sure he could succeed.
He made the leap anyway. And just in time. The great divide came. He had known it at the time but he went from being a nonessential server in a nonessential restaurant to becoming an essential worker in an essential business and could work from home. To this day, he considers this to be the luckiest professional break he has ever had. After all, the restaurant he left was closed fully for many months and then opened later only to take out.
What a strange time when the choice of profession had to consider whether government might suddenly decide you are dispensable!
And yet here we are today, with firings sweeping the tech and media industries. The essentials are suddenly discovering that they are being declared nonessential to the companies that are clamoring to patch up their financials in light of inflation and tight credit.
How long did these people believe they could get away with this? Forever, one supposes.
Well, the day of reckoning is here for the vast numbers of privileged professionals who celebrated their lucky essential status and took advantage of vast stimulus payments and technology to monetize the credentials and class without actually contributing anything productive. They are being found out. Certainly that is happening at Twitter today.
Allow me to conclude with a personal anecdote. One of my earliest jobs was working maintenance in a department store. One task I had was to search changing-room floors for pins and needles that might have dropped from packaging. They had to be found and picked up, else customers would find a needle through their foot. That’s bad for business. Another job I had was cleaning the restrooms and making sure that every stall had plenty of toilet paper.
I was perhaps 14-years old (age-restriction enforcement was lax back then). I recall feeling an enormous sense of pride at the importance of what I was doing. A customer who had a needle in the foot, or went to the men’s room stall only to discover too late that there is no toilet paper, would obviously never come back to that store. I recall feeling as if the fate of the whole company depended on me. I was essential.
May we never again experiment with such egregious divisions of the workforce again. A thriving economy depends on a vast and international community of work in which no job is menial, no job is above or below anyone. In a free and just society, no class of workers gets to coast their way to riches at the expense of anyone else.
Final advice to terminated Twitter employees: find a job where you are both essential and productive, even if it involves work that cannot be simulated by a mouse jiggler, even if it involves serving customers and society at large.
The latest jobs report shows that most of the opportunities these days are in the hospitality industry. Try it.
