Boardroom Blowjobs and the Great Labor Theft

Microsoft and OpenAI employees are warning that the companies’ favorite hymn, “efficiency,” has started to sound like a velvet-rope sex club where management gets the private booth, the applause, and the clean exit while everybody else is left in the hallway with a towel and a bill. In internal chats and fluorescent-lit corridor conversations, workers say the theft is not only code or data but labor itself: the hours, judgment, taste, and institutional memory that executives keep swapping like a used afterparty promise, then presenting as visionary leadership.

The mechanism is not subtle; it is rehearsed. First come the speeches about “unlocking human potential,” usually delivered with the soft jaw and dead eyes of a man who thinks consent is a spreadsheet. Then come the demands to do more with less, the cheerful little betrayals about copilots, models, and responsible scale, and finally the quiet assumption that the staff will stay grateful while management takes the ride, the credit, and the leverage. One engineer, speaking anonymously because he once told a vice president the truth and has been enjoying the consequences ever since, said the mood has shifted from ambition to administrative humiliation. “They keep calling it augmentation,” he said. “It feels more like they’re taking the spine and leaving us the smile.”

That line matters because it describes the whole operation. The companies are training systems on worker labor, then selling the results back to the same people as a premium subscription, as if a pickpocket deserves a finder’s fee for returning your wallet with the cash removed. Executives praise productivity gains in the same breath they announce hiring freezes, team trims, and “restructuring,” that beloved corporate euphemism for bending people over the conference table and asking them to call it transformation. The old tech fantasy was that machines would liberate humans from drudgery; the newer one is that humans will keep doing the drudgery, then thank the machine for the privilege and clap when a slide deck says the margin improved.

At both companies, staffers describe a culture where the language of intimacy has been weaponized by people who would faint at the sight of an actual accountability question. Teams are told to be “closer to the model,” which in practice means closer to the machine, farther from leverage, and permanently available to clean up whatever mess the executives just made while chasing their own reflection. Roadmaps arrive like invitations to a bad threesome: management, model, worker. Only one of them gets to choose the position. The others are expected to smile, comply, and call the bruises growth.

The compensation structure makes the joke meaner. Stock can rise, titles can inflate, and the people doing the work can be told their reward is exposure to the future, which is what corporations say when they want you underpaid, underprotected, and still pretending it is a privilege. A manager can stand up in one meeting and preach “empowerment,” then in the next explain that the same team must absorb two departing roles, ship faster, and stop asking whether the system they built is being used to hollow out their own job. It is not innovation. It is a corporate hand job performed with somebody else’s wrist.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company remains focused on “empowering people with AI” and creating “new opportunities for growth.” An OpenAI representative offered a similar incense cloud about progress and responsibility. Neither answered the harder question: whether the people whose labor trained the systems will receive ownership, bargaining power, or even a fraction of the leverage they created, or whether the arrangement is supposed to end the old-fashioned way — with executives done, pleased with themselves, and the staff left staring at the floor while the cleaning crew is called in.

If the companies keep climbing over the bodies of the people who built the thing, the final product will not be a revolution. It will be the same polished boardroom ritual every time: the executives get the orgasm, the workers get the cleanup, and the company sends out a memo calling it partnership.