The 20th Century as the Century of Labor: the invention of retirement, knowledge work and the worker as capitalist

In the early 1900s, labor followed capital. Specifically, workers came off of the farm to work in factories. By the late 1900s, capital followed labor.

Workers used to need the industrial capital that increased their productivity; investors now need intellectual capital that increases their returns. Four companies are now worth more than a trillion dollars, making thousands - possibly hundreds of thousands - of investors rich. Those four - Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet (Google) - have leveraged the efforts of knowledge workers via the design of software, processes, and processes.

In the same way that workers once brought their labor to factories that made things in places like Manchester or Detroit to enhance the return to their efforts, investors now bring their capital to these companies that manipulate the symbols of things to enhance the returns to their capital.

The Labour Party was founded in 1900 in the UK. At about that same time, the Democratic Party was struggling to reinvent itself from the farmers' party to a labor party. These changes in political realities followed from changes in economic realities.

The 20th century was the century of labor, which got its workweek reduced from 60 to 40 hours, gained safer working conditions, got children out of factories and into schools, and invented retirement, something made possible by extending life expectancy from 47 to 77 and making labor the new bourgeois, investors in their own and other companies' stocks as they built up retirement portfolios.
And this reality of making more and needing to prepare for a retirement also made financial capital more eager to invest in the companies that hired knowledge workers.

Employees at companies like IBM and Eastman Kodak in the 1960s began to buy stocks in their own companies as their salaries grew. They saw surprising returns from this and informed family and friends. Investing became more popular. In 4Q of 1969, mutual funds were worth $48 billion. By 4Q 2019, mutual funds were worth $17.7 trillion.

One of the reasons that financial capital is no longer scarce is because there are so many capitalists now. An increasing percentage of employees are also investors. This new abundance of capital has driven down its price; the returns to capital measured by the interest rates on bonds has moved close to zero. It's no wonder that everyone - even labor itself - is now placing bets on the returns to labor and entrepreneurship in the form of stock in the companies that employ the most iconic of today's knowledge workers.