How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class [View all]

[JudyM]

... In effect, management consulting is a tool that allows corporations to replace lifetime employees with short-term, part-time, and even subcontracted workers, hired under ever more tightly controlled arrangements, who sell particular skills and even specified outputs, and who manage nothing at all.

... the managerial control stripped from middle managers and production workers has been concentrated in a narrow cadre of executives who monopolize planning and coordination. Mid-century, democratic management empowered ordinary workers and disempowered elite executives, so that a bad CEO could do little to harm a company and a good one little to help it. Today, top executives boast immense powers of command—and, as a result, capture virtually all of management’s economic returns. Whereas at mid-century a typical large-company CEO made 20 times a production worker’s income, today’s CEOs make nearly 300 times as much.


Management consultants insist that meritocracy required the restructuring that they encouraged... Consultants seek, in this way, to legitimate both the job cuts and the explosion of elite pay. Properly understood, the corporate reorganizations were, then, not merely technocratic but ideological. Rather than simply improving management, to make American corporations lean and fit, they fostered hierarchy, making management, in David Gordon’s memorable phrase, “fat and mean.”
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When restructurings eradicated workplace training and purged the middle rungs of the corporate ladder, they also forced companies to look beyond their walls for managerial talent—to elite colleges, business schools, and (of course) to management-consulting firms. That is to say: The administrative techniques that management consultants invented created a huge demand for precisely the services that the consultants supply.
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A deeper objection to Buttigieg’s association with McKinsey concerns not whom the firm represents but the central role the consulting revolution has played in fueling the enormous economic inequalities that now threaten to turn the United States into a caste society.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckinsey-destroyed-middle-class/605878/

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Posting this not a criticism of Pete, since his choosing McKinsey doesn’t fully define him, but as an interesting angle to think about as we consider the larger issues of repairing society that the next POTUS will face. Which candidate(s) has the insight to tackle this sociological, structural problem? We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.

My first priority is beating trump like a rug and rolling back everything we can of his monstrous reign. My second priorities are climate and corruption. But we’d be wise to focus also on the importance of fixing these large structural issues that have daily meaning in the lives of masses of voters.