Make money doing the work you believe in
White collar sweatshops.
Here’s an interesting, historically grounded piece that charts the rise of exploitation in law firms, and how they used diversity rhetoric to expand the pool of people who will put up with this:
“By the end of the 1980s, the takeover boom left law firms larger and more diverse, but also much worse places to work. These firms, just like the banks and consultancies they worked with, needed legions of exploitable workers at the very same moment when the reservoir of graduates finally included white women and minority men and women. The diversification of the US professional class, then, wasn’t just due to social movement victories. It was also profitable.
Once at those elite firms, studies found, women and minority attorneys worked longer, with less guidance from senior partners, in the most routinised practice areas. And they faced the worst chances of enjoying the deferred compensation that came with making partner. Female associates who cut back their hours for care obligations found themselves shunted onto the ‘mommy track’, a fate that guaranteed they would never attain partnership. At the end of the 1980s, women made up 33 per cent of all associates at large firms, but only 9 per cent of partners. Meanwhile, Black associates fought stereotypes as they struggled to find mentors who would shepherd them toward partnership. Throughout the decade, the number of Black partners in New York remained so small that they could comfortably fit around a single table at their annual luncheon….
There were also fewer and fewer alternatives. By the 1990s and 2000s, law’s labour revolution had spread to other professions. Doctors, academics, consultants, bankers and journalists – careers that had been insulated from the most savage forms of labour exploitation – watched their independence erode as management became more profit-driven and bureaucratic. To take just one example: in medicine, corporate consolidation, especially under private equity ownership, has remade the field over the past three decades. Doctors report feeling stripped of their autonomy. Patient visits are now graded on a metric of ‘relative value units’, which prizes speed and revenues but leaves little room for care that could not be billed to a patient’s insurance provider. For one emergency physician, corporatisation has robbed her work of its higher purpose. ‘It’s all about the almighty dollar and all about productivity,’ she told The New York Times Magazine in 2023, ‘which is obviously not why most of us sign up to do the job.’ Professionals have less autonomy and less free time than ever.”