1. In order to quickly shift labor between assembly lines during WWII and the Cold War that followed, the Pentagon came up with a novel way to classify labor, issue them portable security clearances and then to set policy for Defense industry players to lay off workers en masse from one contractor and hire them up en masse into another as various significant contracts (eg, Patriot Missiles, Space Shuttle, etc.) were being awarded by the government to different contractors.

2. While the Pentagon no doubt heralded this as an awesome way to compete against countries that owned and controlled all means of production --looking at you USSR and PRoC--, on the ground, these shifts were quite unsettling, especially to the young scientists and engineers that had been born into The Great Depression some 20-40 years before winding up trapped in this system.

3. Workers that, in their childhoods, had watched their family starve to death, relatives being traded away for their own good would do ANNNYTHING to avoid being laid off, even if it only meant burning down their savings for 3-6 months and building it back up over a few years. It took ten seconds for low-level managers to pickup on this FEAR and to begin using it as LEVERAGE. (So capped wages, no real opportunity to decide when to switch between companies, etc.) Any pushback or rebellion from the workers (unionization, etc.) caused their portable security clearances to also be used as LEVERAGE. So much for freedom, at least in support of our Nation's defense (and profits at publicly held Defense companies).

NOW..

Around the mid-late 1970s, but really after the Cold War ended in 1990, some Defense workers began to branch out into private enterprise and they brought with them these same philosophies on workforce management, particularly to Silicon Valley (which is, itself, a legacy of the Defense industry). These policies infected the headhunters who became rich on the workforce movements between private companies and the changing income tax collection policies, helping these demented ideas spread to new generations of workers and companies far removed from Defense.

POST INTERNET ERA

..Fast forward a few years and in a marketplace where scientists and engineers of all types (not just those moving between Defense contractors) were being laid off and rehired among cooperating-competitors ("coopetition") Left and Right, low level managers were using LEVERAGE in ways the Defense industry could not even dream of (due to GAO oversight). Yet in the absence of portable security clearances, couldn't the workers just rebel (unionize, etc?) No. Execs at Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe formed shared lists that served the same purpose as portable security clearances and ultimately had to pay (a paltry) $415 million for anti-poaching settlement. (To an untrained blogger or reporter, it looked and was reported as these companies having a way to "hang on to valuable talent" and it looked limited to just these players, but in reality, some of these policies had existed in soft forms via headhunters for 25 years and were actually LEVERAGE over "assets with legs" and keep them in fear of being utterly destroyed (by preventing them from being hired anywhere else) if they stepped "out of line".

CONCLUSION

So what did the non-Defense low-level managers use this LEVERAGE over the private workforce of scientists and engineers for? #1: Confiscation of Patents, #2: Wage/Retirement Retardation (often forcing the labor to participate in risk of company failure with stocks/options/derivatives), #3: Unpaid Overtime and Deconstructing Worker Families (discouraging children and any other distractions) and the biggest one of all, something that not even Defense dared do (out of fear of running afoul of routinely audited federal labor laws), #4: SHIFTING THE ENTIRE COST OF WORKER RETRAINING ONTO THE WORKER.

So if you're a company LIKE the one being discussed above and you want to reallocate half your paid wages (billions of dollars) to people who already are experts at building what you think is coming into focus as The future, what do you do? You layoff half of your people (using any excuse that keeps the cost of doing that down) and you don't even have to wait until that's done before you begin hiring in the new workers. If you're one of the "victims", don't take it personally and go find a company that has a different view of The future (even if you don't agree with it) and use the "runway" to reinvent yourself. (There are other alternatives!)

FIXING IT?

Why isn't this taught to people considering such careers back in high school or college? Maybe if it was, they would choose not to Go, or at least have a plan to be ready to start their own venture after their first (or second) Go Around. All I can tell you is that the public didn't have any glimmer of any of this until that major $415M settlement back in 2015. In the decade since, they've adapted by siloing technologies (can expand if anyone wants, but this post is too long). Until this gets out there to the point where mother's don't let their kids get involved in this field (or maybe it all is rendered obsolete someday by AI), this situation provides a low-cost free-flowing market for labor to VC-backed startup companies and established players alike. If you are fortunate enough to be in one of their "home runs" (and forced, not by the company, but by the industry, to be paid in equity), then you get a parachute and whatever is left of you can become, I don't know, Eric Schmidt?