In 1898, Frederick Taylor was hired as a consultant by the Bethlehem Iron Company with the stated mission of improving the efficiency of the workers. It was there that Taylorism morphed from the wheedling ideas of an eccentric into canonical corporate practice. As Nikil Saval notes in Cubed, Taylor’s recipe for efficiency rested on a singular, and dehumanizing, foundation:

The key, [Taylor] would discover, was to take knowledge away from the workers and install it in a separate class of people.

Saval, Cubed, page 47

That being the managers, of course. Taylor’s model of workplace productivity depended entirely on deskilling, on the invention of unskilled labor—which, heretofore, had not existed. More than half a century later, long after Taylor died while gripping a watch, Peter Drucker would pick up the baton he left behind and intone about the arrival of “knowledge workers.” But his definition of this new class of workers existed entirely in opposition to Taylor’s stories of their supposedly unknowledgeable peers:

Drucker’s subsequent description of the insensate labor of unskilled men in factories draws almost entirely from Taylor’s portrait of them—and accordingly condescends to their abilities to plan and organize work. In actual fact, it wasn’t so. Before Taylor, work was already organized by teams of factory workers, who in large part had control over how they worked. The knowledge they applied to work was largely “tacit” in nature, agreed upon among workers themselves rather than “explicit” (to borrow a famous definition from the sociologist Michael Polanyi). What Taylor sought in particular—indeed, what constituted his signal obsession—was to extract this tacit knowledge and install it in another set of people, the “industrial engineers.” Drucker called them “the prototype of all modern ‘knowledge workers’”—a plausible assumption but one that excised the tremendous amount of knowledge that already existed in the work process.

Saval, Cubed, page 197

In other words, Drucker’s now-infamous formulation of knowledge workers only makes sense if you accept the premise that other workers do not themselves truck with knowledge. But that premise was the product of theft—an outcome of Taylor’s extraction rather than a natural or immutable fact of the work. Or, as Saval writes:

In this respect, it’s probably better to think of knowledge work as the name of a desire, or a hope, rather than an actual feature of the workplace.

Saval, Cubed, page 199

Perhaps it’s even better to acknowledge that there never were any knowledge workers. There have only ever been workers.