The Room

Think about the last time you worked late.

Not because you wanted to. Because it was expected. Because the work doesn’t stop. Because somewhere between the life you imagined and the one you’re living, the hours got longer and the margin got thinner and you told yourself: this is just how it is.

It is how it is.

The question is who decided that.

1971

A corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a memo.

Not a law. Not a policy. A memo — marked confidential, sent to the US Chamber of Commerce, never meant for you to read.

It described a problem: business had lost too much ground. Wages were too high. Workers had too much leverage. Universities were too critical. Courts were too hostile to corporate interests.

It proposed a solution: a systematic, long-term campaign to reclaim influence. Over courts. Over universities. Over media. Over government. Not through corruption — through organisation. Through patience. Through rooms.

Two months after writing it, Lewis Powell was appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon.

The memo became a blueprint. And the people who read it got to work.

You weren’t in that room.

1981

Ronald Reagan fired eleven thousand air traffic controllers in a single day.

They had gone on strike. He told them to go back to work. They didn’t. He fired them all, banned them from federal employment for life, and had the military run the airports while replacements were trained.

It wasn’t just a labour dispute. Every boardroom in America was watching.

For thirty years before that, wages and productivity had moved together. When workers produced more, they earned more. That was the agreement.

After 1981, the lines on the graph split apart and never came back together.

You weren’t in that room either.

The 1990s

The rules were rewritten.

NAFTA. The repeal of Glass-Steagall — the law that had separated ordinary banking from high-risk investment since the Great Depression. Deregulation across industry after industry.

Each change presented as modernisation. Progress. Inevitability. Bipartisan support. Passed with confidence.

Most of it was drafted, in large part, by the industries it was meant to regulate. The people writing the rules of the room were already in it.

2008

Decades of decisions collapsed in a single autumn.

Trillions in wealth gone — homes, savings, retirements. Ordinary people who had followed the rules, worked the hours, paid the bills.

Then the rooms convened again.

The institutions that had built the instruments that caused the collapse were handed public money to survive it. The reasoning: they were too important to fail. Too central. Too connected.

No meaningful criminal charges were filed. Bonuses were paid the following year.

The people who lost their homes lost them anyway.

The people who designed the system that failed kept their wealth, their positions, and their access to the rooms where the next set of rules would be written.

You were told this was a crisis. You were not told it was a result.

The 2010s

Public services were cut to pay for a crisis ordinary people didn’t create.

Housing prices in most major cities detached from wages — not temporarily, but permanently. The gap between what people earned and what a stable life cost grew wide enough that an entire generation quietly stopped expecting to close it.

Work was repackaged. The platform economy arrived with a new language: flexibility, freedom, entrepreneurship. You weren’t an employee. You were a partner. Your own boss.

What that meant in practice: you bore your own costs. Your own risk. Your own instability. The margin — the part that used to be called profit — went somewhere else.

And underneath all of it, something harder to name.

The normalisation.

The sense that this is just how things are. That the difficulty is personal. That the answer is to work harder, optimise better, want less, be more resilient.

The room doesn’t need you to be angry at it.

It just needs you to keep showing up.

Think again about the last time you worked late.

The last time you looked at your account and felt the distance between the life you’re living and the one you thought you were building toward.

The last time you told yourself: this is just how it is.

It is how it is.

But it didn’t become this way by accident. It became this way through decisions, made in rooms, by people who understood exactly what they were building.

They weren’t building it against you.

They were building it without you.

There’s a difference. And it matters.

The question is not whether the system can be changed.

The question is whether it was designed so that you would never believe it could.

The facts in this piece are documented and verifiable.

• The Powell Memo (1971): Powell, Lewis F. Jr. “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” Confidential memorandum to Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., Chairman, Education Committee, US Chamber of Commerce. August 23, 1971. Archived at the Lewis F. Powell Jr. Archives, Washington & Lee University School of Law. Powell was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Nixon on October 21, 1971 — two months after writing the memo.
• Reagan and the PATCO strike (1981): President Reagan dismissed 11,359 striking air traffic controllers on August 5, 1981, after they refused to return to work. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) was subsequently decertified. Widely documented; see US National Archives records and contemporaneous reporting.
• Wages and productivity diverging after 1981: Economic Policy Institute. “The Productivity–Pay Gap.” epi.org/productivity-pay-gap. The divergence begins in the early 1980s and has continued without reversal.
• Repeal of Glass-Steagall: The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act was signed into law on November 12, 1999, removing the separation between commercial and investment banking established by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
• 2008 financial crisis and bailouts: The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (October 2008) authorised $700 billion in bailout funds (TARP). Major institutions receiving funds included Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and AIG. No senior bank executive was criminally convicted in connection with the crisis. Bonus payments at bailed-out institutions resumed in 2009; see New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s report, “No Rhyme or Reason: The ‘Heads I Win, Tails You Lose’ Bank Bonus Culture,” July 2009.