The systematic dismantling of the American Dream through corporate sovereignty
1956. A General Motors worker in Flint could buy a house, a car, a television set. This was not remarkable. This was the point. The arrangement was simple. Loyalty for security, time for prosperity. A high school graduate could walk into a factory and walk out thirty years later with a pension. Department stores filled with washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners — all made by workers who could afford to buy them. The system worked because it was designed to work.
I think about this while looking at photographs from the period. Parking lots full at shift changes. Union halls packed for meetings. Shopping centers rising in suburbs built for workers who had never dreamed of being middle class. The numbers tell the story: union membership at 35%, single-income households at 65%, company pensions covering nearly half of all private sector workers. The golden goose laid its eggs with mechanical regularity.
The math was clear — workers earned enough to buy what they made. Corporations profited from a consumer class they themselves created and maintained. Benefits weren’t called benefits then — they were part of the bargain, as basic as the time clock and the factory whistle. A General Electric employee in 1960 didn’t think about health insurance or retirement. These came with the job like safety glasses and work boots.
Now I stand in what was once the parking lot of Bethlehem Steel. Bruce Kendrick parks in the same spot his father once did, though there is no longer any reason to park here. His father died with a pension. His grandfather died with a pension. Bruce got a COBRA (Continuation of Health Coverage) form. The story changes in ways we don’t always notice until the ending has already been written.
The transformation began with a court reporter's handwritten note. In 1886, J.C. Bancroft Davis, doing what we would now call data entry, wrote that corporations were "persons" under the 14th Amendment. The amendment had been written to protect formerly enslaved people. The irony does not escape me as I watch lawyers enter the federal courthouse in Delaware, where more corporations claim residence than people. The count in 2023 surpassed 2 million corporations, about 1 million residents. They share the same streets, the same courthouse, but move in different realities.
The evolution of corporate personhood happened so gradually few noticed. In 1978, the Supreme Court decided corporate money was speech in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti. Speech needs protection, the Court reasoned. Money needs channels. By 2010, in Citizens United, the Supreme Court removed all limits on this particular form of expression. The balance of power tilted like a carnival game rigged by invisible hands - more money, more speech, more corporate influence shaping a democracy that had forgotten its own reflection.
Then came Hobby Lobby in 2014. Corporations could now hold religious beliefs, claim conscience, object. I consider this while watching workers line up at a Hobby Lobby store in Oklahoma City, where employers’ beliefs determine health coverage but employees’ beliefs remain their private concern.
The numbers tell their own story, but numbers have always been a kind of narrative we create. CEO compensation increased 1,322% since 1978. That’s 351 times as much as a typical worker. These figures appear in reports, in academic papers, in the kind of documents that circulate in Washington. The people I meet don’t talk about percentages. They talk about second jobs, about moved-in parents, about children who won’t do better than they did.
We measure different things now. Corporate quarterly reports track “human capital efficiency.” Wall Street analysts calculate “labor cost optimization.” The Department of Labor still counts “jobs created,” but doesn’t distinguish between a forty-hour union position with benefits and three gig work apps running simultaneously on a worker’s phone. These are considered equivalent data points.
In Minneapolis, Melissa Pérez counts out her receipts from a shift at Buffalo Wild Wings. The ritual is familiar—quarters lined up, singles straightened, credit card slips annotated. The money tells one story. The hours before and after tell another. Forty-five minutes rolling silverware before the shift begins. Thirty minutes filling sauce bottles after the dining room empties. Twenty minutes wiping walls while the kitchen closes. The clock runs but the tips don’t. This is called side work in the industry. This is called unpaid labor in reality.
I watch Pérez stack chairs onto tables at midnight. She’ll be back at ten tomorrow morning to take them down again. The corporation calls this being a team player. Her daughter calls this why mom’s never home. Both are telling different versions of the same truth. In the fourteen states where servers still make $2.13 an hour, such stories are not unique. They are not even interesting. They are simply how things are.
The language shifts in ways that matter. Eastern Airlines showed other corporations how to use bankruptcy in 1989. They called it Chapter 11. They called it reorganization. Forty thousand workers called it the end. When Bethlehem Steel followed in 2001, they called it “controlled liquidation.” The control belonged to the corporation. The liquidation belonged to the workers. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation — even the name a kind of corporate poetry — took over $3.7 billion in obligations. The pensions shrank. The executives kept their retirement packages.
Johnson & Johnson refined the art in 2022. The 'Texas Two-Step,' they called it, as though it were a dance and not a strategy to dodge billions in lawsuit payouts to cancer victims who claimed their talcum powder was contaminated with asbestos. Create a new company. Give it the old company's debts. Bankrupt the new company. The lawyers who invented this charged $2,465 per hour. The victims got settlements averaging $42,000. These numbers exist in the same America.
I find evidence of change in union halls that now house daycare centers. In the late 1960s, union contracts typically guaranteed defined benefit pensions after thirty years of service. By the early 1980s, companies began offering 401(k) plans alongside traditional pensions. Twenty years later, many new contracts mentioned only the 401(k). The language shifted so gradually that each change seemed reasonable at the time. This is how things are lost.
In Seattle, I visit an Amazon fulfillment center built where Boeing once assembled 747s. The workers wear tracking devices that monitor their movements. The devices are called “productivity enhancers.” The old Boeing contract specified two fifteen-minute breaks per shift. Amazon’s AI system calculates “time off task” in seconds. Progress is measured differently now.
At a tech conference in San Francisco, I watch demonstrations of AI systems that can manage entire workforces. They optimize schedules, assign tasks, evaluate performance. A CEO tells the audience this eliminates human bias. No one asks about human judgment. No one mentions human dignity. The business schools have theories about all this. Creative destruction, they call it. Market efficiency. Dynamic optimization.
I think about these terms while watching Tom Harrigan, a former Boeing machinist, check his Uber app for rides. His father retired from Boeing in 1985 with a pension that let him tour Europe. Tom lives in a shared apartment and drives sixty hours a week. Both scenarios represent market outcomes. But only his father’s era delivered on the promise of efficiency — where workers could afford to be consumers and companies profited from a stable middle class. Tom’s gig work, for all its algorithmic optimization, feels neither creative nor efficient.
The language of quarterly earnings calls has its own poetry. “Rightsizing” means layoffs. “Strategic realignment” means moving jobs overseas. “Optimization” means replacing people with algorithms. These terms appear in business school case studies. They appear in management consulting reports. They appear in severance packages.
Bruce Kendrick’s grandson shows me his phones. DoorDash, Uber, Amazon Flex, each with its own algorithm tracking his movements. His grandfather’s pension book had actual pages. You could hold it. It guaranteed specific things. The grandson’s work life exists in clouds, both metaphorical and digital. Nothing is guaranteed except the right of algorithms to optimize his productivity.
The golden goose story was always about sustainability, about systems that could persist. We tell ourselves new stories now, about disruption and creative destruction, about market efficiency and algorithmic optimization. We accept terms like “human capital efficiency” and “labor cost optimization.” We watch pensions become 401(k)s become gig work apps. We call this evolution. We call this progress. We call this inevitable.
But in the empty parking lot of what was once Bethlehem Steel, where three generations of one family once parked in the same spot, the story feels different. The corporations won their personhood. They won their rights. They won their freedoms. They won until winning itself became a kind of loss. Now they face a problem no one planned for—workers who can’t afford to buy their products. The golden goose isn’t just dead. It has been rendered for parts, restructured, bankrupted, and automated.
Some stories end. Some just transform into different stories. The question isn’t whether corporations killed the golden goose. The question is what kind of stories we’ll tell ourselves about why it had to happen.
Corporate America can continue to raise their prices, reduce worker’s benefits, erode health care—but soon the middle class will run out of money. And America will run out of middle class. There will only be the poor — who have already been left behind.
Who will feed the rich then?
Images ©2024 Gael MacLean
Notes:
Buffalo Wild Wings has faced several workplace violations and lawsuits in recent years. Here’s a comprehensive list of the alleged violations and legal actions:
Wage and Hour Violations
Unpaid Wages and Off-the-Clock Work
A class-action lawsuit filed in California in 2021 alleges that Buffalo Wild Wings failed to provide proper meal and rest breaks, and required employees to work off the clock without compensation.
Employees were allegedly instructed to clock out for meal periods but continue working, depriving them of both breaks and wages.
Tip Credit Violations
A lawsuit filed in Georgia federal court in 2021 claims that Buffalo Wild Wings improperly used tip credits to avoid minimum wage obligations.
The company allegedly failed to properly notify workers about tip credit provisions as required by law.
Improper Side Work and Cleaning Duties
Multiple lawsuits allege that Buffalo Wild Wings required tipped employees to spend excessive time (over 20% of their shifts) on non-tipped side work and cleaning duties while still paying them at the lower tipped minimum wage.
Uniform Expenses
Lawsuits claim that Buffalo Wild Wings required employees to purchase their own uniforms without reimbursement, effectively reducing their wages below the legal minimum.
Other Labor Law Violations
Failure to provide accurate wage statements
Some lawsuits allege that Buffalo Wild Wings failed to provide accurate wage statements to employees, violating California labor laws.
Unreimbursed Business Expenses
Employees claim they were required to use personal vehicles for work-related travel without proper reimbursement.
Specific Lawsuits
Devore v. BWW Resources, LLC et al. (filed September 2021 in California)
DePalo v. Buffalo Wild Wings Inc. (filed November 2021 in Georgia federal court)
A collective action lawsuit filed in Ohio and West Virginia (filed August 2021)
A class action lawsuit filed by Fitapelli & Schaffer, LLP on behalf of tipped workers in New York
Sanchez v. BWW Resources LLC and Inspire Brands Inc. (filed in Texas federal court, date unspecified)
These lawsuits and allegations span multiple states and involve various aspects of labor law, primarily focusing on wage and hour violations, improper use of tip credits, and failure to reimburse work-related expenses.
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