Déjà Vu: When Leaders Forget Our Labor History
My major in college was Industrial Labor Relations. To be honest, I was drawn to the major because the only required science was psychology, but it ended up having a profound influence on my career. Industrial Labor Relations examines the relationships between employers, employees, labor unions, and the government within the workplace, focusing on issues like collective bargaining, labor laws, worker rights, conflict resolution, and the impact of broader societal factors on employment dynamics. Essentially, I spent four years (and now many more) analyzing people and policies within the workplace.
Historical Context of “Taylorism”
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the history of labor in my day-to-day, but reading the headlines and tactics of DOGE recently has been bringing it all back. Elon Musk's strategies in the workplace have a striking resemblance to “Taylorism”, a management philosophy from the early 20th century that includes rigid hierarchy and strict surveillance of employees.
Frederick Winslow Taylor's Scientific Management (1911) emerged during the Second Industrial Revolution when American manufacturing was booming. Taylorism focused on efficiency and control; it was a response to skilled craftsmen who maintained control through their expertise and tacit knowledge. Taylor aimed to transfer this knowledge to management through time studies and standardized processes, effectively de-skilling labor and shifting power to management.
The Watertown Arsenal Strike of 1911 was one of the first direct challenges to scientific management.? When Taylor's time-motion studies were implemented at this federal armory, skilled machinists walked out. Attempts to regiment human work ultimately fail.
Taylorism is often considered to have failed primarily because it excessively focused on maximizing efficiency through rigid work processes at the expense of employee motivation, autonomy, and overall well-being. This approach led to low morale, reduced creativity, and worker resistance due to a lack of control over their work methods and decision-making power.
Muskism Has a Similar Ring
Fast forward to the headlines today and you'll see some striking similarities. This weekend, Musk tweeted that employees must document their work or resign. Agencies are pushing back, and already Musk is backpedaling, but it is exactly the rigid, efficiency-focused strategy that ultimately undermined productivity in the past. It assumes the worst in the workforce—that people are coming to work to get away with doing nothing—rather than recognizing intrinsic motivation.
Another example: go back a week to Musk's “fork in the road” email offering a severance package for resignation while threatening that those who did not take the offer would likely find themselves fired anyway. This parallels the "drive systems" of early 20th century management that relied on fear rather than engagement.
All the research we have on human behavior suggests that building a culture of fear significantly reduces productivity. Forbes examined this in “Do you have a culture of fear?” where Liz Ryan suggests, "spending your workweek trying to avoid losing your job can be downright exhausting and demeaning. In reality, such organizations are at the highest risk of going out of business and putting everyone back in the job market or on unemployment."
Modern Tech's Labor Relations Evolution
Management strategy continued to evolve after Taylorism fell out of favor. The human relations movement, sparked by the Hawthorne studies of the 1920s-30s, recognized that worker satisfaction affected productivity. By the mid-20th century, companies like IBM under Thomas Watson Sr. had pioneered employee-focused policies that fostered unprecedented loyalty and innovation.
The tech industry in particular brought real innovation to management approaches. In the 1980s-90s, companies like HP embraced "management by walking around" and open-door policies. Fedex days and Google 20% time proved that the best way to get creative solutions is to allow time for innovation and autonomy. Research by psychologists like Teresa Amabile has consistently shown that intrinsic motivation—not external pressure—drives the most valuable creative work.
How This Will Affect Our Future
So why is Elon Musk seemingly reverting to early 20th century management philosophies? Why hasn't he learned from the tech giants of this century and the extensive research on motivation and productivity? If the best predictor for the future is past history, we know how this story ends.
The sheer number of talented people affected, the disruption to ongoing work, and the damage to pipelines of future talent will likely be devastating. Just like so much of our history, the history of labor is cyclical. We see recurring patterns of control and resistance, with periods of worker empowerment followed by management reassertion of authority.
What makes the current moment unique is that knowledge workers have more leverage than industrial workers of the past—they can more easily take their skills elsewhere. Companies that create psychological safety, as documented in Google's Project Aristotle research, consistently outperform those that rely on fear and rigid control.
Time to dust off my college texts to prepare for what will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most significant management missteps of our time—a cautionary tale of forgetting that people, not processes, drive innovation and growth.