The numbers looked less like a timesheet than evidence from an endurance test. When US District Court Judge Leonard Sand reviewed a request for legal fees submitted by the New York firm Skadden, he paused over the record of one young associate. Margaret Enloe had billed 78.5 hours in five days. One shift had lasted 17 hours. After leaving the office, she returned the next morning and proceeded to record another 24 hours without interruption.
Sand could scarcely imagine how any lawyer could sustain such a schedule. Enloe, then only a second-year associate, treated it as unremarkable. She possessed, she said, an unusually high level of energy. There had been other 24-hour stretches during her time at Skadden.
Her body could endure them. Her career could not.
After two and a half years, Enloe left the firm without becoming a partner. She moved to an in-house position at an accounting company, joining the steady procession of young attorneys who had entered elite law with impeccable credentials and departed before reaching its upper ranks. The decision was not dramatic. There was no spectacular collapse or public confrontation. She had simply reached the point at which continuing seemed less rational than leaving.
“I needed to change something,” she later recalled. The pace could not be maintained. Whatever prestige the job carried, the arrangement had become impossible to mistake for a sustainable professional life.
To Judge Sand, Enloe’s schedule appeared extraordinary. Inside the largest American law firms of the 1980s, however, it was becoming an organisational ideal. Associates were expected to bill 2,500 hours a year, sometimes closer to 3,000. Because not every hour spent at work could be charged to a client, meeting those targets required living inside the office: early mornings, late evenings, cancelled weekends and meals consumed beside piles of documents.
Long hours had once been defended as the necessary price of apprenticeship. A junior lawyer observed senior attorneys, learned how a case or transaction worked, and gradually acquired the judgment required to practise independently. Yet the new generation of associates was often working more while learning less. They proofread contracts, compared nearly identical drafts, organised files and reviewed boxes of documents without being told how their labour contributed to the larger legal strategy.
Partnership, meanwhile, receded like a horizon. Firms hired far more associates than they could ever promote. The young lawyer was encouraged to imagine that years of sacrifice would eventually be repaid with ownership, autonomy and status, although the arithmetic made that outcome impossible for most of the people doing the work.
That contradiction produced a new kind of workplace. These firms still spoke the language of professional excellence, collegiality and intellectual distinction. Their offices contained polished tables, private dining rooms and shelves of leather-bound books. The workers wore expensive suits and possessed elite degrees. Nevertheless, the basic machinery increasingly resembled the factories that white-collar professionals believed they had escaped.
A narrow group controlled the clients, the revenue and the strategic knowledge. Beneath them, a much larger workforce carried out fragmented assignments under intense time pressure. Each worker’s productivity was measured, compared and converted into income for the owners. Junior lawyers might earn salaries that placed them comfortably above the national average, but the firms could charge clients several times what those lawyers were paid.
One associate described the relationship with unusual precision. The workers did not merely lack ownership of the means of production. They themselves had become the means of production.
The new meritocracy did not abolish hierarchy; it made endurance look like talent.
By the end of the decade, evidence of distress had become difficult to dismiss. Lawyers reported depression at several times the rate found in the wider population. Alcohol abuse was widespread. Professional surveys found young attorneys anxious, disillusioned and uncertain whether the work they performed was ethically defensible. An American Bar Association report concluded that many associates were approaching a breaking point.
The misery was not confined to law. Doctors complained that administrators were interfering with clinical decisions. Young bankers remained at their desks through the night to revise financial models that senior colleagues might barely examine. Management consultants travelled continuously, living between conference rooms, airports and hotel rooms while producing presentations whose recommendations were often determined before the research began.
These occupations remained desirable precisely because entry was difficult. Their salaries, credentials and institutional names promised security in an economy offering less of it elsewhere. The harder the jobs became to obtain, the easier it was to interpret suffering inside them as proof that the work mattered.
This helps explain why intelligent people tolerated conditions they openly described as intolerable. The white-collar sweatshop was not maintained by coercion alone. It relied on aspiration. Employees were encouraged to treat exhaustion as an investment in themselves, even when the institution captured most of the return.
Three historical forces made the arrangement possible. Finance acquired unprecedented power over American corporate life. Professional firms adopted more aggressive managerial systems. At the same time, universities sent a larger and more diverse generation of ambitious graduates towards occupations that had once excluded them.
A fourth force, less visible but equally important, connected the other three: prestige became a substitute for control. Young professionals accepted diminished autonomy because an elite employer’s name appeared to increase the value of their future selves. The firm was not merely buying their labour. It was selling them a story about where that labour might eventually lead.
The transaction looked voluntary. In practice, the two sides possessed very different kinds of patience. A firm could replace an exhausted associate with another graduate. The associate, carrying educational debt and having invested years in a specialised career, could not abandon the path so easily. The employer paid in money and reputation; the employee paid in time, health and foreclosed alternatives.
Those pressures were especially strong among people whose families lacked the wealth or connections that made professional experimentation less risky. A young lawyer from an established elite family might leave a punishing firm, join a relative’s business or spend a year reconsidering a career. Someone who had borrowed heavily for university and law school could not treat departure as casually.
This vulnerability became entangled with one of the era’s genuine achievements. Elite firms grew less uniformly white, male and Protestant. Women, Black graduates, Asian Americans, Latinos, Catholics and Jews entered institutions that had long kept them outside. Formal barriers weakened. Recruitment appeared more meritocratic. Yet inclusion arrived at the same moment that the bargain of professional employment was deteriorating.
The result was not simply hypocrisy. Firms did not necessarily diversify while secretly wishing to preserve the old order. Many partners sincerely believed they were identifying talent that discriminatory institutions had ignored. Nevertheless, their openness also solved an urgent business problem: they needed more workers than the old elite could supply.
Prestige became a form of deferred pay, valuable enough to attract workers but uncertain enough that most would never collect it.
During the middle decades of the 20th century, the most powerful New York law firms operated according to a gentlemanly code. These “white-shoe” partnerships enjoyed enduring relationships with banks and corporations. Their partners tended to come from the same universities, neighbourhoods, churches and social circles as their clients. Trust was personal because business and class identity overlapped.
The arrangement discouraged open competition. Firms were reluctant to steal one another’s clients. Certain transactions, particularly hostile takeovers, were dismissed as disreputable. Lawyers imagined themselves as custodians of institutions rather than vendors in a market for legal services.
Such professional restraint protected insiders, but it rested on exclusion. In 1970, only three women were partners at New York’s leading firms, and the number of female associates remained tiny. Jewish lawyers were routinely denied employment at prestigious firms. Black attorneys found almost no place in corporate law. Even white men whose accents, surnames or manners suggested the wrong ethnic origins could be rejected as insufficiently polished.
The sociologist Erwin O Smigel observed that established firms sought lawyers who looked Nordic, possessed agreeable personalities and appeared “clean-cut”. Recruitment was less an examination of ability than a test of social resemblance. A candidate was expected to reassure partners that he belonged to the same world.
Below the white-shoe firms stood Jewish and mixed-ethnicity practices. Excluded from the most lucrative corporate relationships, they built reputations in areas the elite considered inelegant: litigation, bankruptcy, real estate and mergers. Skadden belonged to this second tier.
Joseph Flom, who would become central to Skadden’s rise, was the son of a Jewish garment worker from Brooklyn. He attended Harvard Law School with assistance from the GI Bill, only to be rejected repeatedly by established Wall Street firms. Skadden offered him an alternative, although it was hardly an empire. Founded in 1948, it still employed only 10 lawyers in the early 1960s.
Despite their social differences, old-line and outsider firms shared a partnership model associated with Cravath, the archetypal white-shoe institution. Partners owned the firm and divided its profits. Administrative structures remained rudimentary. There were few professional managers, limited public relations, modest accounting departments and no elaborate human-resources bureaucracy.
Lawyers recorded their time inconsistently. Financial information remained private. Partnership decisions were mysterious, sometimes deliberately so. Clients were treated almost as confidential family connections. To ask a lawyer whom he represented was to ask a question bordering on indecency.
The secrecy disguised favouritism, but it also limited the capacity of firms to measure every movement of their employees. Young lawyers worked hard, although the prevailing understanding of hard work differed sharply from what came later. A 1958 pamphlet suggested that billing more than 1,300 hours annually could not reasonably be expected without overworking an attorney.
Firms also maintained relatively low ratios of associates to partners. Junior lawyers were not guaranteed promotion, yet partners could plausibly imagine that they were training future colleagues. Apprenticeship served a practical purpose because the organisation expected at least some of its recruits to remain for decades.
This system was neither humane in every respect nor open to everyone. Its tolerable conditions were partly financed by monopoly, social closure and a lack of competition. The professional autonomy enjoyed by insiders depended on the exclusion of outsiders.
That historical fact created a political trap. When the old order began to collapse, few people wished to defend it. Greater competition looked like progress. Broader recruitment looked like justice. More transparent measurement appeared fairer than decisions made in private clubs.
All three changes contained emancipatory possibilities. Together, however, they enabled firms to replace an exclusionary paternalism with an inclusive regime of extraction.
The protected professional world of the 1950s was opened to outsiders only after its protections had begun to disappear.
Wall Street supplied the shock that accelerated the transformation. Deregulation, global capital and a rising appetite for corporate restructuring produced a surge of mergers, acquisitions, buyouts and hostile takeovers. Between the mid-1970s and the end of the 1980s, the annual value of mergers multiplied dramatically.
These transactions moved quickly. A takeover could require financing agreements, regulatory filings, litigation strategies and the examination of thousands of pages of corporate records. Clients demanded immediate responses. A small partnership organised around personal mentorship could not easily provide them.
Law firms grew into institutions capable of mobilising armies. New York’s largest practices doubled in size during the 1980s. Skadden, having embraced takeover work before many of its competitors, expanded even more rapidly. In 1970, its 28 lawyers occupied offices above a Fifth Avenue clothing shop. Eight years later, it employed 150. By the middle of the next decade, the number reached 500. In 1990, it passed 1,000 without relying on a merger with another firm.
The organisation did not expand evenly. Associates multiplied faster than partners. At Skadden, at least four junior lawyers laboured beneath each partner, creating one of the highest leverage ratios in the country.
Leverage was not merely a feature of the workforce. It was the economic engine. A partner could supervise several associates whose time was billed to clients at profitable rates. Increasing the number of juniors allowed revenue to grow without dividing ownership among a comparable number of people.
Rapid hiring soon exhausted the traditional supply of recruits. Law schools were not producing enough top-ranked graduates to meet demand. In 1987, approximately 700 firms travelled to Harvard Law School to compete for a graduating class of around 500. Skadden alone was adding almost as many lawyers each year as Yale Law School produced.
Firms could respond in two ways. They could reduce their ambitions, or they could reconsider whom they regarded as qualified. Skadden chose the latter.
Its partners recruited from schools that white-shoe firms had treated as secondary. Fordham, a Catholic university in the Bronx, supplied more new Skadden associates during part of the early 1980s than Harvard or Yale. New York University, associated with upwardly mobile Jewish students, became another important source.
The firm also hired women and racial minorities more readily than many competitors. By 1984, it employed more Black associates than any other major New York firm, although the absolute number remained painfully small. Cravath, by comparison, employed none. Skadden was among the few leading firms with a Black partner and, by the late 1980s, women represented close to 30 per cent of its associates.
To recruits who had encountered discrimination elsewhere, Skadden’s culture could feel exhilarating. It presented itself as unsentimental and transactional. Family background mattered less than the ability to complete the assignment. Nancy Lieberman chose the firm partly because its diversity suggested that it was not governed by Wall Street’s blueblood traditions.
The promise was direct: nobody cared whether an associate was male, female, orange or purple, provided that the work was done. Roger Aaron, who oversaw hiring, described meritocracy as embedded in the institution. Skadden’s lawyers did not succeed because of their social-register status. They succeeded because they performed excellent legal work.
This belief was not necessarily cynical. Outsider partners remembered being excluded and took pride in refusing to reproduce the same barriers. Yet their meritocracy defined merit in a way perfectly suited to the takeover economy. The most valued quality was not only intelligence or legal judgment. It was availability.
Anyone could rise, the firm suggested, as long as they could work whenever required, suppress obligations outside the office and remain functional under extreme pressure. Equal opportunity was offered on the condition of equal submission to an unequal organisation.
Recruiting a broader workforce therefore served both justice and profit. Decades of discrimination had created a reserve of talented graduates eager to prove themselves. Firms could draw from that reserve precisely when they needed large numbers of ambitious employees.
The door widened. The corridor behind it became longer, steeper and more crowded.
Diversity widened the door, but debt narrowed the exit.
Expansion created another problem. Partnerships designed for dozens of lawyers could not supervise hundreds. Informal management, once conducted through conversation and personal observation, gave way to systems.
In 1980, Skadden appointed Earle Yaffa as managing director. He was not a lawyer. He came from the accounting firm Arthur Young and possessed both management and accounting qualifications. The appointment signalled that running a law firm was becoming a specialised business activity rather than a responsibility shared casually among partners.
Yaffa encountered an organisation growing too rapidly for its administrative habits. Lawyers and secretaries still recorded billable hours on pieces of paper, which might remain unsorted in desk drawers. He hired a computer programmer to build a system capable of collecting and analysing those records.
The change sounded technical. Its consequences were cultural.
Once hours entered a computer, managers could compare associates, departments and offices. They could identify who was busy, who appeared underused and how closely each worker approached an ideal level of utilisation. Monthly reports converted the ambiguous rhythms of professional work into apparently objective numbers.
The imagined fully utilised associate was a peculiar creature. This person did not become ill, take holidays, eat lunch, use the bathroom or spend significant time on tasks that could not be charged to a client. No human being could embody the model, but every human being could be measured against it.
Quantification promised fairness. Unlike the old partnership, where advancement depended on secret conversations among socially connected men, the new firm appeared to reward visible effort. An associate could point to a record of billed hours as evidence of commitment.
Yet the measure also transformed commitment into an open-ended obligation. Once 2,000 hours had been reached, 2,200 demonstrated greater dedication. If one associate billed 2,500, another might attempt 2,700. A metric intended to describe work began to prescribe it.
Employees participated in the escalation. At Skadden, associates created a monthly “Beast of Burden” prize for the colleague who had endured the most hours and abuse. Suffering became a form of competitive distinction. A partner’s verbal attack could even earn additional recognition.
One associate averaged roughly 350 billed hours a month while working on successive mergers. That amounted to about 12 billable hours every day, weekends included, before counting meals, commuting or uncharged tasks. After leaving the firm, he framed the computerised record. It was not a certificate of expertise. It was proof that he had survived.
This internal pride was crucial. A factory foreman could order workers to increase output. The white-collar sweatshop achieved something more efficient: it encouraged workers to police themselves and admire the evidence of their own overuse.
Once the technology spread, other firms followed. By the early 1990s, an American Bar Association study compared the behaviour of law-firm managers less to enlightened professionals than to industrial supervisors from an earlier age of capitalism.
The comparison had limits. Associates earned high salaries, often twice the median household income. In 1986, starting compensation reached $65,000, equivalent to far more in later purchasing power. These were not impoverished labourers.
Money, however, did not restore control over their time. In some respects, high salaries made the system harsher. Firms treated every unbilled hour spent training a junior lawyer as a costly diversion. A young associate earning an exceptional salary was expected to become profitable immediately.
Partners had once taught by allowing juniors to observe meetings, draft substantial documents and discuss strategy. Under the new economics, instruction appeared inefficient. Takeover work generated enormous fees and moved at speed. It was more profitable to divide a matter into small tasks and bill each associate’s execution than to slow the process for education.
The result was professional de-skilling inside institutions famous for expertise. First-year associates filed documents, corrected punctuation, organised exhibits and checked contracts line by line. Teams sat in rooms without windows comparing versions of financing agreements. Many rarely encountered the partner whose name appeared on the matter.
Senior associates became intermediaries, distributing assignments like foremen. Juniors learned to complete tasks accurately without understanding the whole. Their formal qualifications increased while the intellectual content of their daily labour narrowed.
Once time could be measured, professional judgment could be reorganised as output.
By the end of the 1980s, law firms were larger, richer and more diverse. They were also less capable of offering the bargain through which professional sacrifice had traditionally been justified.
Women and minority associates often experienced the contradiction most severely. Firms recruited them as evidence of modernity but concentrated them in routinised practice areas, provided less mentorship and promoted them at lower rates.
For women, any reduction in hours associated with pregnancy or care obligations could lead to the “mommy track”, a supposedly accommodating route that quietly removed partnership from consideration. Women accounted for roughly one-third of associates at large firms by the decade’s end but less than one-tenth of partners.
Black associates confronted isolation and stereotypes while searching for senior lawyers willing to sponsor them. Their numbers at the partnership level remained so small that New York’s Black partners could gather around a single table for an annual meal.
The old regime had denied outsiders entry. The new one admitted them without redistributing ownership. Inclusion was concentrated at the bottom of the hierarchy, where labour generated fees. Exclusion survived at the top, where profits were divided.
Still, ambitious graduates continued to arrive. Their behaviour can look irrational only if salary is treated as the sole reward. Elite firms offered something less tangible: a recognised identity.
To work at Skadden, Cravath or another famous institution was to become the sort of person who had succeeded in an extremely selective competition. The name on a business card could reassure parents, impress classmates and open future doors. Even employees who despised their jobs feared that leaving too soon would mean surrendering the value of having obtained them.
Many had reached law school without a settled desire to practise law. Patrick Griffin, a student at the University of Michigan in the late 1970s, described a generation that was bright, verbally agile and effective on examinations but uncertain how to translate those abilities into a vocation.
Law school offered delay without appearing like hesitation. A legal degree was prestigious, legible and theoretically flexible. Students could postpone choosing a life while continuing to accumulate achievements.
For graduates from immigrant or minority backgrounds, the attraction was especially powerful. Corporate law represented access to institutions from which their parents or grandparents might have been excluded. Entering an elite firm did not feel like capitulation. It could feel like historical vindication.
Once at law school, students were channelled towards large firms through a recruiting infrastructure that made corporate employment easier to obtain than many supposedly less conventional alternatives. Public-interest work often paid less and attracted more applicants. Government positions seemed modest beside the salaries offered to summer associates.
Debt turned preference into necessity. A student who had borrowed heavily might retain an abstract desire to represent tenants, defendants or community organisations, yet a Wall Street salary supplied an immediate solution to a concrete financial problem.
Recruiting then converted uncertainty into momentum. Summer programmes offered elegant dinners, attentive partners and the temporary illusion that junior lawyers enjoyed glamorous lives. Permanent offers arrived before students had acquired enough experience to evaluate the profession. Accepting was easy. Refusing required a plan.
The degree that promised optionality gradually eliminated it.
After joining, young lawyers discovered an atmosphere built around fear. They rarely saw their families. Meals arrived at their desks. Intellectual ambitions narrowed to subsections of securities regulations and discrepancies between document drafts. The work was often too specialised to explain to anyone outside the firm, yet too fragmented to provide a satisfying sense of mastery.
One of Griffin’s friends described routine 14-hour days and the near-total loss of control over his own life. The humiliation did not arise only from being worked hard. It came from feeling both indispensable to the firm’s revenue and irrelevant to its decisions.
Associates compared themselves to crabs trapped in a tide pool, moving constantly without finding a route out. By 1990, the five-year attrition rate at large law firms exceeded 80 per cent. Estimates at Skadden were higher still.
Leaving did not necessarily prove that the system had failed. High turnover could benefit the firm. Departing associates carried its name into corporations, banks and government agencies, creating a network of potential clients. New graduates replaced them at the bottom. The institution retained the revenue they had generated without granting them equity.
Attrition was therefore not merely tolerated. It was incorporated into the model.
The promise of optionality became a machinery of entrapment.
Women and minority lawyers nevertheless had reasons to remain invested in the language of meritocracy. The alternative was not an imaginary profession combining equality, autonomy and humane hours. The most visible alternative was the old white-shoe order, in which they might never have been hired.
Equal opportunity, though compromised, represented a genuine victory. Criticising the conditions attached to it could be made to sound like ingratitude or weakness. Those who had fought to enter elite institutions were reluctant to say that the prize had changed before they received it.
By the 1990s and 2000s, moreover, there were fewer protected professional refuges to which they could escape. The managerial revolution moved beyond law. Hospitals, universities, banks, newspapers and consulting firms adopted similar methods of measurement, consolidation and cost control.
Doctors experienced the shift as a loss of authority over patient care. Clinical encounters were divided into billable units. Administrators assessed productivity through revenue and speed. Time spent listening to a frightened patient could appear less valuable than a procedure that generated a reimbursable charge.
Academics faced expanding temporary employment, performance audits and pressure to convert research into measurable outputs. Journalists produced more material with fewer colleagues as ownership consolidated. Consultants and bankers encountered utilisation targets, rankings and constant evaluation.
Across these occupations, a common structure emerged. Professionals remained essential in aggregate but became disposable as individuals. An organisation could not operate without doctors, lawyers, analysts or teachers. Yet it could treat any particular doctor, lawyer, analyst or teacher as replaceable.
The legal journalist Ruth Marcus compared the major firms of the 1980s to the carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors, forever demanding more young lawyers to feed its growth. The image now applies across the credentialled economy. Hospitals consume nurses. Universities consume adjunct instructors. Banks consume analysts. Technology companies consume engineers and contractors.
The appetite is sustained by a queue. Universities continue to produce ambitious graduates trained to regard entry into a prestigious institution as evidence of personal worth. As long as enough applicants believe that a few punishing years will secure future freedom, employers can design jobs that consume the present.
Technology has intensified the arrangement without fundamentally changing it. Modern professional workers may not write hours on paper slips, but their activity leaves constant digital traces: log-in times, message histories, completed tasks, response speeds, client interactions and revenue generated.
Measurement no longer merely records performance. It shapes attention. Workers learn which activities are visible to the system and prioritise them, even when less visible work would produce better outcomes. Judgment is displaced not because managers openly reject it, but because judgment is difficult to display on a dashboard.
The ideal employee becomes someone whose labour can be counted continuously and whose uncertainty never slows production. Professional knowledge remains valuable, but only after it has been compressed into standardised outputs.
Such systems alter personality as well as behaviour. Associates learn to speak of themselves in utilisation percentages. Consultants describe their weeks through chargeability. Doctors discuss patients through units. Academics count citations and publications. Workers absorb the categories through which they are managed.
This is why the white-collar sweatshop does not feel identical to an industrial plant, even when its organisation resembles one. The control is partly psychological. Workers are invited to understand the institution’s demands as expressions of their own ambition.
They compete to stay later, answer faster and appear less burdened by ordinary human needs. Exhaustion becomes embarrassing only when it reduces output. Until then, it can be displayed as commitment.
The professional class also occupied a peculiar place in the wider transformation of the American economy. Lawyers were not merely victims of financialisation. They helped construct it.
Every takeover, leveraged buyout and strategic bankruptcy depended on legal work. Associates prepared the documents through which corporations were purchased, divided, refinanced or closed. Their misery was linked to transactions that produced much more severe consequences for workers outside the office.
As financial priorities spread, corporations laid off employees to satisfy investors, finance acquisitions or defend themselves against takeovers. Unionised industrial workers were especially vulnerable. The term “downsizing” entered ordinary language during the 1980s, converting mass unemployment into a neutral managerial procedure.
Between 1980 and the middle of the following decade, a substantial share of American households experienced a layoff. Workers who had spent decades building specialised skills discovered that loyalty offered no protection once a merger or restructuring redefined their jobs as costs.
Robert Muse, an aircraft machinist in Southern California, lost his position after a merger when he was 47. Two years later, he performed maintenance work for half his previous salary, unclogging toilets and trimming trees. Three decades in one occupation, he said, ought to have counted for something. Instead, their value vanished with an organisational decision.
Corporate bankruptcy supplied another field of expansion. After Congress revised the federal code in 1978, large firms entered a practice area they had previously regarded as disreputable. Bankruptcy ceased to be understood solely as a desperate response to insolvency. It became a strategic instrument.
Companies could use proceedings to reduce debts, void contracts and escape obligations to workers. Continental Airlines declared bankruptcy in 1983 despite possessing substantial assets. The process allowed it to abandon union agreements, dismiss thousands of employees and sharply reduce labour costs.
Each strategy required teams of attorneys. Young associates worked through the night to produce filings that transferred insecurity from balance sheets to households. The professionals experienced exploitation inside the firm while facilitating it outside.
Their own suffering did not make them responsible for every consequence. An associate proofreading a bankruptcy document possessed little authority over corporate strategy. Yet the structure depended on this fragmentation of responsibility. No worker needed to endorse the entire project. Each had only to complete a narrow assignment.
The same division that deprived associates of meaningful legal education also insulated them from the moral content of their labour. A task appeared technical because the system concealed the lives affected beyond it.
The system did not merely exhaust professionals; it trained them to export exhaustion.
This is the deeper significance of the white-collar sweatshop. It was not an unfortunate side-effect of a more dynamic professional economy. It became one of the institutions through which insecurity was manufactured and distributed.
Lawyers’ long hours generated fees. Those fees came from transactions designed to extract value, reorganise companies and weaken commitments to employees. The system consumed its professional workforce while using that workforce to dismantle the security of others.
Eventually, the logic returned to the people who had administered it. The doctrine that every cost should be reduced, every activity measured and every worker replaceable could not remain confined to factories. Once established as a general principle of management, it moved upwards.
Banking analysts now describe 100-hour weeks and physical collapse. An internal survey of junior Goldman Sachs employees in 2021 found reports of 16-hour days, mistreatment by senior bankers and worsening health. One analyst compared the experience unfavourably with foster care.
Doctors, lawyers and consultants increasingly discover that credentials do not exempt them from the pressures once associated with industrial labour. They may occupy higher floors and receive larger salaries, but they face the same demand to surrender control over the pace and purpose of work.
The boomerang is not accidental. Professionals helped legitimise a system in which shareholder return outweighed durable obligations. They prepared the contracts, designed the restructurings, measured the efficiencies and explained why disruption represented progress. Their employers later applied the same reasoning to them.
Since the 1980s, the vocabulary has changed more readily than the structure. Firms speak of resilience, performance, excellence and high-impact cultures. Universities promote flexibility. Employers offer wellbeing programmes. None of these expressions alters the distribution of power if workers remain unable to control their time, understand the whole of their work or share meaningfully in the value they create.
Meritocracy remains the system’s strongest defence. Because entry is formally competitive, success appears earned. Because some associates become partners, every associate can be told that promotion is possible. Because salaries are high, complaints can be interpreted as entitlement.
Yet a contest may be meritocratic at the point of entry and exploitative after admission. Diversity in recruitment does not guarantee equality in ownership. High compensation does not create autonomy. The possibility of advancement does not justify a structure mathematically designed to deny advancement to most participants.
Nor should the old professional order be romanticised. The humane pace enjoyed by mid-century insiders was protected by racial, religious, gender and class barriers. Returning to that arrangement would restore comfort only by restoring exclusion.
The challenge is more demanding: to separate professional autonomy from social privilege. A just workplace would have to preserve the widened entrance while redistributing the protections once reserved for insiders. It would treat mentorship as productive rather than wasteful, recognise responsibilities outside employment and give workers influence over the organisation of their labour.
Above all, it would stop using aspiration as an inexhaustible resource.
Margaret Enloe’s 24-hour billing record was shocking because it exposed what professional language was designed to conceal. No amount of salary or prestige could transform a day without sleep into a normal expression of excellence. The work was not proof of extraordinary freedom. It was evidence that the institution could claim every hour she possessed.
Enloe eventually exercised the freedom that remained to her and left. Thousands of others would do the same. Their departures were often described as personal choices, changes of interest or failures to adapt. Seen together, they revealed something more systematic.
The firms had built a model in which talented people entered faster than they could be trained, worked harder than they could remain healthy and departed before they could claim ownership. Diversity supplied new recruits. Debt discouraged early exit. Prestige disguised the loss of autonomy. Measurement ensured that no usable hour escaped.
The white-collar sweatshop succeeded because it appeared to be the opposite of a sweatshop. Its workers arrived voluntarily, competed for admission and received impressive salaries. They were called associates rather than labourers. Their exhaustion was packaged as ambition, and their disposability as opportunity.
That appearance has allowed the model to travel far beyond Wall Street law. Wherever institutions convert professional judgment into measurable output, wherever status compensates for missing control, and wherever a queue of indebted graduates waits to replace those who leave, the same machinery is already operating.
The offices may be brighter now. The dashboards are more sophisticated. The workforce is more diverse. The labour remains hungry.
