Production workers did not escape the whirlwind, as companies—again with help from consultants— stripped them of their residual management functions and the benefits that these sustained. Corporations broke their unions, and jobs that once carried bright futures became gloomy. United Parcel Service, long famous for its full-time workers and promoting from within, began emphasizing part-time work in 1993. Its union—the Teamsters—struck in 1997, under the slogan “Part-time America won’t work,” but failed to return the company to its past employment practices. UPS has since hired more than half a million part-time workers, with just 13,000 advancing within the company.

Overall, the share of private-sector workers belonging to a union fell from about one-third in 1960 to less than one-sixteenth in 2016. In some cases, downsized employees have been hired back as subcontractors, with no long-term claim on the companies and no role in running them. When IBM laid off masses of workers in the 1990s, for example, it hired back one in five as consultants. Other corporations were built from scratch on a subcontracting model. The clothing brand United Colors of Benetton has only 1,500 employees but uses 25,000 workers through subcontractors.

The shift from permanent to precarious jobs continues apace. Buttigieg’s work at McKinsey included an engagement for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, during a period when it considered cutting up to 1,000 jobs (or 10 percent of its workforce). And the gig economy is just a high-tech generalization of the sub-contractor model. Uber is a more extreme Benetton; it deprives drivers of any role in planning and coordination, and it has literally no corporate hierarchy through which drivers can rise up to join management. As ever, consultants are at the forefront of change, aiming to disrupt the management function. A new breed of management-consulting firms now deploys algorithmic processing to automate not the line workers’ or sales associates’ jobs, but the manager’s job.

In effect, management consulting is a tool that allows corporations to replace lifetime employees with short-term, part-time, and even subcontracted workers, hired under ever more tightly controlled arrangements, who sell particular skills and even specified outputs, and who manage nothing at all.

Read: The 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy

The management function has not been rendered unnecessary, of course, or disappeared. Instead, the managerial control stripped from middle managers and production workers has been concentrated in a narrow cadre of executives who monopolize planning and coordination. Mid-century, democratic management empowered ordinary workers and disempowered elite executives, so that a bad CEO could do little to harm a company and a good one little to help it. Today, top executives boast immense powers of command—and, as a result, capture virtually all of management’s economic returns. Whereas at mid-century a typical large-company CEO made 20 times a production worker’s income, today’s CEOs make nearly 300 times as much. In a recent year, the five highest-paid employees of the S&P 1500 (7,500 elite executives overall), obtained income equal to about 10 percent of the total profits of the entire S&P 1500.

Management consultants insist that meritocracy required the restructuring that they encouraged—that, as Kiechel put it dryly, “we are not all in this together; some pigs are smarter than other pigs and deserve more money.” Consultants seek, in this way, to legitimate both the job cuts and the explosion of elite pay. Properly understood, the corporate reorganizations were, then, not merely technocratic but ideological. Rather than simply improving management, to make American corporations lean and fit, they fostered hierarchy, making management, in David Gordon’s memorable phrase, “fat and mean.”