A HARSH WORLD

by David Trammel

“I was born in 1957.

While I like to say, my birth was the pivotal event of that year, something else happened of note. My father was hired by the US company McDonnell Aircraft as a sheet metal worker at the Tulsa plant, but quickly he was offered a position at their main plant in Saint Louis. As soon as I was born, my mother and I joined him.

America’s infrastructure and manufacturing had survived the War intact. More than intact, expanded into a global source of goods and trade. Ready to help the World recover. It was a time when the ‘American Dream’ was born. When one parent, usually the father, could work a single job and provide for their family well.

And America had it’s dreamed set high.

President Kennedy wanted to put men on the Moon and McDonnell Aircraft won the contract to begin that race into space. My father, now in the new aerospace department, worked his way up the ladder. By the time of the first launch he had progressed to the point he was John Glenn’s crew chief on his history making orbit around the Earth. Over the next four decades, without a college degree, he advanced step by step until he became a General Foreman overseeing half of the St Louis facilities.

That was the promise then. The contract between an employer and the employees. Work long and hard, do what the company needed and in return you would see increasing wages, benefits like vacation and health insurance, and then an eventual pension which would provide for your comfortable retirement after many years of faithful service.

And that contract worked. It drove the American economy to record heights, and brought a shared prosperity to much of the rest of the World.

Like all dreams though, people eventually woke up.

In the new economy after the World War, labor was not a cost to be minimized. It was a resource to be cultivated. Firms trained people because skills accumulated internally. They promoted from within because experience mattered. They retained workers because losing them meant losing knowledge that companies could not easily replace.

And worse, trained employees were valuable to their competitors. Train someone, then if their wages didn’t match their new effort, they would leave and not look back.

From the early post war period, and then into the 1960s, workers were treated as long term investments. Not because corporations were benevolent, but because the economic environment rewarded internal development.

The company invested internally because doing so made sense. Knowledge compounded. Loyalty reduced friction. Stability supported productivity. A single income could support a household because wages reflected the expectation of permanence. Pensions and benefits were not gifts. They were tools for retention in a system that expected long horizons.

A person could enter an organization fresh out of high school and build your new life over time. Advancement and higher wages followed familiarity and contribution to the company. Supervisors and then Management was cultivated from inside the plant. Janitors sometimes became CEOs. A sheet metal worker becomes a plant manager.

This structure made effort visible and more importantly, rewardable. You could see where you stood. You could see what came next. The future was not guaranteed, but it was navigable. Companies expected to exist for decades. Markets were comparatively stable. Competition was slower. Growth depended on institutional knowledge and continuity.

The shift from rural country farming communities and light manufacturing labor per-World War One, to a post World War Two economy of corporate employment, global markets and a peace guaranteed by American might did not happen because workers changed. Nor did the fundamental nature of corporations either.

It happened because the systems that made up the period between both wars underwent such a drastic shift, that it broke. We are in a similar period now.

—

By the mid to late 1970s, many large firms still looked stable from the outside. They employed tens of thousands of people. They owned factories, land, equipment, patents, and brand trust accumulated over decades. They generated steady, if unspectacular, cash flow. Under the old logic, these were signs of health.

Under the new logic, they were signs of opportunity.

Once corporations were reframed as financial instruments rather than long-lived institutions, a different set of eyes began to study them. Not with the question of how to improve their ability to make things, but how to extract more value from what already existed. This was the environment in which corporate raiders and early private equity firms emerged as powerful actors.

They did not create the new logic. They exploited it.

Corporate raiders identified companies that were slow, stable, and asset rich. Firms with factories, pensions, long serving employees, and layered management structures. These organizations were not broken. They were predictable. And predictability, under the new financial lens, meant vulnerability.

The playbook was simple and devastating. Acquire a company cheaply. Load it with debt. Sell off divisions, land, or equipment. Cut payroll aggressively. Eliminate supervisors and middle managers. Reduce benefits. Break the firm into parts and sell them individually for more than the original purchase price.

This process was not framed as destruction. It was framed as discipline. Something to be admired as the future.

People sometimes forget that Richard Gere’s character in the 1990s movie “Pretty Woman” was a corporate raider who bought and dismantled companies for profit. Though by the late 80s, people were already waking up to the shift in business from making something of value, and into ways of extracting a little bit of the action.

What made this possible was not just access to capital, but a shift in legitimacy. Management consulting firms and business schools had already begun teaching executives to see labor as a cost center and middle management as inefficiency. Raiders merely demonstrated how profitable that view could be when applied without restraint.

The result was a pincer movement.

On one side, consultants taught firms that internal investment was outdated. That loyalty created complacency. That stability reduced competitiveness. On the other side, raiders punished firms that failed to adopt this logic quickly enough. Companies that still carried large work forces and pensions were no longer seen as responsible employers. They were seen as poorly managed.

This is a crucial point.

Many firms dismantled their internal ladders not because they were taken over, but because they feared being acquired and destroyed. The threat itself was enough. Executives learned to behave as if a hostile bidder was always watching their balance sheet. Decisions that once would have been unthinkable became routine.

Supervisors were cut first. They were visible. They were numerous. They did not directly generate revenue in spreadsheet terms. The connective tissue between strategy and execution was labeled bloat and removed. Training budgets followed. If employees left, they could be replaced on the open market. If they could not, that was framed as a labor problem, not an institutional one.

This is where the worker’s position fundamentally changed.

Under the old contract, experience accumulated inside the firm. Time increased value. Under the new model, experience became something you were expected to arrive with, fully formed, at your own expense. Companies stopped cultivating workers and started shopping for them. Credentials replaced mentorship. External hiring replaced internal promotion.

Risk moved downward.

When firms trained workers, they carried the risk of that investment. When they stopped training, that risk shifted to the individual. Education debt, career instability, and continuous reskilling became personal responsibilities rather than institutional ones. The worker was told this was freedom. Flexibility. Opportunity.

In practice, this was just one more way to push the costs and debts onto others, while retaining all the reward and profit for themselves.

Private equity intensified this pattern. Where corporate raiders had been episodic, private equity made extraction systematic. Firms were no longer valued primarily for what they produced, but for what could be stripped, leveraged, and sold. Debt became a tool, not a danger. Labor costs became the easiest variable to adjust. Long term health became irrelevant once the exit timeline shortened.

None of this required malice.

Business leaders made decisions prudent at the time. Politicians responded to business’s assurance they knew what they were doing, when in fact they were just following the herd off the cliff. No one at Wal-Mart when it first began consciously chose to pay their workers so little, they needed Food Stamps to survive. They did it because everyone else was doing it too.

Executives were rewarded for a focus on short term performance. Consultants were rewarded for cost cutting. Investors were rewarded with rapid returns. Within that environment, loyalty became irrational behavior. Stability became inefficiency. Long term planning became a liability.

The old contract did not collapse because it stopped working. It collapsed because it interfered with faster extraction.

This is why so many people experience modern work as incoherent. They are still operating with assumptions that effort compounds and loyalty matters. But the systems they inhabit no longer recognize those inputs consistently. Advancement appears random. Wages stagnate despite productivity gains. Jobs disappear even when companies are profitable.

The worker did not fail to adapt. The environment changed its rules.

By the time these changes became visible to most people, they were already normalized. Children were taught to expect multiple careers. Stability was recast as naivete. The absence of pensions was framed as personal empowerment. The loss of internal ladders was treated as inevitable.

What disappeared in the process was a clear vision of the future.

People could no longer see how effort translated into outcomes. Planning became provisional. Commitment became risky. Careers fragmented into sequences of jobs rather than trajectories. Stress increased not because people were doing less well, but because they were operating inside systems that no longer handled pressure in predictable ways.

This was the transition into the new work environment. Not a sudden break, but a steady reorientation of incentives that rewarded extraction over cultivation. The visible effects came later. The real shift happened quietly, in boardrooms, on spreadsheets, and tucked into strategic frameworks that treated institutions as strippable assets rather than shared enterprises.

Understanding this transition matters because it explains why trying harder often makes things worse. It explains why competence no longer guarantees stability. It explains why exhaustion persists even among people who are capable, informed, and disciplined.

The contract was not renegotiated. It was removed.

What followed then was not a story about decline or betrayal. It is a story about systems behaving exactly as they were redesigned to behave. And it sets the stage for the larger question that follows.

If the rules for work were rewritten in this way without them telling us about it, what else has been?

—

When effort and outcome are decoupled, effort alone cannot restore balance.

Many people respond to this break by doubling down. They optimize their schedules. They hustle harder. They add credentials. They accept instability as normal and tell themselves that adaptability is simply the cost of modern life. When progress stalls, they look inward. They assume they must not be disciplined enough, skilled enough, or resilient enough.

This response is understandable. It is also exactly what a broken contract produces.

Trying harder inside a system that no longer honors effort does not rebuild stability. It accelerates exhaustion. It converts structural change into personal shame. It keeps people busy at the very moment when clarity is needed most.

The central misunderstanding is that the old contract failed.

It did not.

The old system of internal investment, training, and shared long-term prosperity functioned within the limits of its time. It was not dismantled because it was inefficient. It was dismantled because it slowed extraction.

Institutions were not reformed. They were harvested.

Factories, divisions, pension systems, trained work forces, and internal ladders were no longer seen as foundations to preserve. Under the new financial logic, they became stores of value that could be stripped, leveraged, and converted into short-term return.

Workers did not become less valuable. They became valuable in a different way.

Not as contributors to be cultivated over decades, but as adjustable costs to be minimized quarter by quarter.

Once this shift took hold, everything that followed made sense inside the system. The disappearance of training. The hollowing out of middle management. The erosion of pensions. The normalization of layoffs in profitable companies. The expectation that individuals would shoulder the risk once carried by institutions.

There were moments when this trajectory could have slowed. Systems could have been redesigned to preserve long-term stability. Incentives could have rewarded continuity rather than speed. Structures could have protected workers displaced by restructuring.

Instead, the rewards flowed in the opposite direction.

Short-term performance brought higher compensation. Faster extraction brought larger returns. Every success reinforced the same behavior. Rather than pulling back, the system leaned further into the logic that produced the gains. What began as financial discipline became the dominant operating principle.

The result is the world of work people inhabit today.

A world where effort no longer compounds reliably. Where loyalty carries little protection. Where planning feels provisional. Where stability is treated as outdated.

The worker did not fail to adapt.

The environment changed its rules.

And it changed them quietly too, letting only those who would benefit from it, know.

No announcement marked the end of the old contract. People were simply expected to adjust while still being measured by standards that no longer applied. The confusion, exhaustion, and loss of trust that followed were not signs of weakness. They were feedback.

The employer–employee relationship was not the only thing transformed in this period.

It was one piece of a much larger shift.

What happened to work was part of a broader transformation in how modern capitalism itself began to operate. The same logic that turned institutions into strippable assets began reshaping entire industries, markets, and daily life.

When you strip cars for parts, you don’t worry about what happens when the lot is empty.

You worry about how much you can get from the next one.

—

In the next lecture, we will widen the lens beyond work itself and examine how this extractive logic became the dominant model of the modern economy, and why so many systems now feel fragile, unstable, and permanently under strain.