It is Elon Musk's Twitter, and he will fire people if he wants to.
Elon Musk is the boss.
No apologies, no compromise.
Elon Musk is a general in the war to reclaim authority in corporate America. It had been slipping away from owners and toward managers and skilled employees. He is tilting the balance of corporate power back. Workers had gotten uppity.
Musk's swashbuckling decisiveness projects a can-do attitude. The leader leads. Musk isn't managing for "stakeholders" of multiple interests who want consensus in a shared power arrangement. He manages for himself.
The intractable inflation of the 1960s and 1970s came from guns-and-butter spending for the Vietnam War, then an oil price shock, and then an expectation settled into society that wages and prices were moving up on an unstoppable escalator. Cost of Living Adjustments--COLAs--were commonplace in rental agreements, labor arrangements, pensions, everything. Leaders didn't set prices. The system set them.
Ronald Reagan shocked that system in 1981, his first year as president. Air traffic controllers were widely acknowledged to have a stressful job. They were understaffed, they had enormous responsibilities, and they were paid middling salaries. Their union, PATCO, wanted higher wages and better working conditions. The federal government refused. Employees struck. Reagan fired them all.
The firing sent a signal that dominated labor relations for a generation. Then, a few years ago, the pendulum began moving back in widely-discussed contracts of movie stars and sports stars. The star had more power than the owner. In the technology industry the coder/entrepreneur who devised a better application created billions of dollars of wealth. A couple of people in a garage or dorm room could create billion-dollar businesses. They could disrupt and destroy hundred year old ones. Talent, not capital, created wealth. Combine that with the retirement of the Boomer generation, with COVID, with a generation of gentle and protective parenting, and the stratification of work where "bad jobs' in agriculture and construction are done by foreign-born people of questionable legal status. The result is an American workforce that is beginning to notice its power. Unemployment is low. Job interviews are two-way explorations. Large and small businesses cannot get work done because they cannot find the employees to do the jobs.
Musk is a disrupter. He announced mass firing at Twitter. He said if employees wanted to keep working they needed to commit to being hard core and to work 18 hours a day. If not, leave. Good riddance.
Reagan's firing PATCO strikers involved only 11,000 people directly, but it sent a giant signal to employees everywhere. There wasn't an escalator. There was a boss who would fire people or move the jobs to China. The rich got richer. Owners of capital did very well in the past 40 years. Worker wages stagnated.
The era of worker empowerment is in its infancy. Technology leads it, but in health care, building trades, hospitality, even government, work isn't getting done because employers cannot find workers. A recession and a bold visible leader can kill this infant in its cradle. Musk appears to be giving it a try. He is showing companies that they can fire employees and survive--or maybe not. We will find out. Maybe every corporation inconvenienced by an advisory board of workers, or a corporate board worried about an ESG score, can do the same.
The world is at work trying to figure out Musk. He is talking about being "anti-woke" and that gets him support on the political right. I think it is much bigger than that. I think he resends the signal Ronald Reagan sent. He represents and leads a counter-trend away from employee empowerment and back toward the power of capital. He is so comfortable being boss that he can make a performance out of letting there be a pretend vote about it. Employees were starting to think they had power, and that has to stop.
When Reagan fired the air traffic controllers my dad refused to ever fly again. I didn't understand it at the time, but now appreciate his way of demonstrating his values when it was very inconvenient to do so.
Who would have thought Elon Musk would turn against workers?