White-collar sweatshops

How did law firms and other professional workplaces become places of such crushing and soulless work?

by Dylan Gottlieb  BIO

Photo by Allen Enriquez/Getty Images

writes and teaches about the history of American cities and capitalism as assistant professor in history at Bentley University in Massachusetts, US. He is the author of Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York (forthcoming, May 2026). He is also the co-host of Who Makes Cents? A History of Capitalism Podcast.

The judge could scarcely believe the figures. Reviewing the request for legal fees by Skadden, the New York-based law firm, the US District Court Judge Leonard Sand ‘shuddered to think’ that any one lawyer could work so relentlessly. Margaret Enloe, a second-year associate, had logged 78.5 billable hours working for a client over a five-day stretch. After a 17-hour day, she had trudged back to the office the next morning – and gone on to bill 24 hours straight. Enloe shrugged off the judge’s disbelief. ‘I’m a fairly high-energy-level person,’ she said. ‘I worked more than one 24-hour day when I was at Skadden.’

That stamina, however, did not make for a long career at the firm. Enloe would not go on to earn a coveted election to partnership. After two and a half years, she left to become an in-house attorney at an accounting firm. ‘I needed to change something. I could not keep going at that pace,’ she told me later. ‘It felt unsustainable.’

Extreme as her work conditions sounded to the judge, Enloe’s experience was becoming the norm at the United States’ largest law firms in the 1980s. Many began to ask associates to bill more hours: 2,500 or even 3,000 per year. Even as young lawyers worked longer – spending 11 or 12 hours every day, including weekends, at the office – they rarely, if ever, enjoyed training by senior attorneys. Instead, they were given menial tasks, like proofreading or document review, with no idea of how it fit into the big picture. Meanwhile, the chances of making partner grew narrower year after year. By the early 2000s, the five-year attrition rate at large firms would rise above 80 per cent.

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Year by year, conditions deteriorated. White-collar workers became more like cogs in a machine than self-directed professionals, more like machinists labouring under a shop steward than valued apprentices ascending a path to partnership. Yes, it took place inside wood-panelled offices, but the dynamic resembled conditions that industrial workers had long faced on factory floors. And, just like in a factory, the system was fantastically profitable. Firms billed clients five times more than they paid out in salary to their relatively unskilled junior associates. ‘The workers not only don’t own the means of production,’ one big-law associate told a reporter. ‘They are the means of production.’

By the end of the 1980s, it was impossible to ignore just how much young lawyers like Margaret Enloe were suffering. They experienced depression at five to six times the rate of the general population. One in five abused alcohol. Attorneys had the highest rate of suicide of any profession. A majority, particularly at large firms, questioned the ethics of their work. One American Bar Association (ABA) report concluded that associates were ‘at the breaking point’.

In truth, a wider shift was afoot. It wasn’t just lawyers: many of the highest-achieving professionals in the US – doctors, bankers and management consultants – were growing unhappier, even as their employers enjoyed record profits. But why did people like Enloe put up with life inside a white-collar ‘sweatshop’ – and why do many continue to do so today?

This was no accident. Young professionals from nontraditional backgrounds were more vulnerable

The answer lies in the collision of three forces that would remake nearly every profession starting in the 1980s: the rise of finance; ruthless new management techniques; and a more diverse generation of young people streaming from the top US colleges into the workforce.

As the venerable partnerships hired rapidly to accommodate the transactional demands of Wall Street, they grew much more diverse in terms of race and gender. Yet they also became terrible places to work. This was no accident. Young professionals from nontraditional backgrounds were more vulnerable – more prone to carry large educational debts, less likely to enjoy reserves of family wealth, less able to access alternative career paths – and thus faced the deepest exploitation.

Taken together, those changes made for a professional world that is, on its face, less racist, less patriarchal and more meritocratic than the one it supplanted, dominated as it was by upper-class white Protestant men from a small corner of the northeastern US. But elite diversification was not the result of altruism. It was also fantastically profitable for the firms that pursued it.

Today, the members of the newly diverse professional class work much harder, in far more competitive environments, with slimmer chances for advancement. From Seattle to New York, young professionals whisper that their firms have become ‘sweatshops’: factories where profits are squeezed out of their white-collar labour force. The exclusionary status quo of the previous mid-century has given way to something more diverse – yet much more exploitative.

As recently as the 1960s, things had been different. The largest law firms, which held a near-monopoly on corporate and Wall Street clients, were ruled by a gentlemanly code of WASP professionalism. And it was no wonder: lawyers at the most old-line and prestigious – so-called ‘white-shoe’ – firms were almost all white Protestant men from elite universities. In the late 1950s, more than seven in 10 of the partners across the 20 largest Wall Street firms had earned their JD (law doctorate) from Harvard University in Massachusetts, Yale University in Connecticut or Columbia University in New York. Firms had cosy relationships with the banks and corporations they advised, strengthened by their shared class and religious backgrounds. The Milbank law firm was known for representing the Rockefeller dynasty. Another firm, Davis Polk, oversaw debt issues for the investment bank Morgan Stanley. An unspoken rule mandated that the firms refrain from outright competition. White-shoe firms refused to handle ‘dishonourable’ deals like hostile corporate takeovers, lest they disrupt their close ties to corporate managers.

But it wasn’t all peachy. In 1970, there were only three female partners and 40 female associates across New York’s top firms. Even white-ethnic men were suspect. In his study The Wall Street Lawyer (1964), Erwin O Smigel noted that WASP firms ‘want lawyers who are Nordic, have pleasing personalities, and “clean-cut” appearances.’

Lower down the hierarchy sat Jewish and mixed-ethnicity firms like Skadden, Enloe’s employer. Shut out of the competition for the largest Wall Street clients, they dominated the derogated fields of litigation, real estate, bankruptcy, and mergers. In New York, many of their partners had roots in the working-class immigrant neighbourhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Joseph Flom, the driving force behind Skadden’s ascendance, grew up as the son of a Jewish garment worker in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He attended Harvard Law School on a GI Bill scholarship. But after graduation, Flom was repeatedly rejected by New York’s WASP firms. So, he went to work at Skadden, which, like almost all Jewish and mixed firms, was tiny. Founded in 1948, by the early 1960s, it had only 10 lawyers.

In 1958, lawyers at large firms could not ‘reasonably’ bill more than 1,300 hours a year without feeling overworked

Whatever their differences, both WASP and Jewish firms with elite aspirations imitated the management structure pioneered by Cravath, the ultimate white-shoe institution. In that system, firms were structured as professional partnerships, with equity and profits........

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