The cruelty has a chain of command. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the structure: the exactors whom Pharoh set over them as officers beat the sons of Israel, saying, Why have not you fulfilled your appointment, to cast (the same number of) bricks as heretofore, today as yesterday?
Notice the layers. At the top, Pharaoh, issuing decrees from his palace. Beneath him, the Egyptian exactors — the royal taskmasters. Beneath them, the Israelite foremen — Hebrew middle managers caught between their own people and their Egyptian overseers. And at the bottom, the ordinary slaves, making bricks without straw.
When the Middle Management Bleeds
The Targum is careful to note that the Israelite foremen themselves are being beaten — not the rank-and-file slaves, at least not in this verse. The middle managers, tasked with producing impossible quotas, absorb the physical blows when the numbers don't add up.
This is one of tyranny's oldest techniques. Make the oppressed police themselves. The Hebrew foremen are simultaneously victims (beaten by Egyptian exactors) and enforcers (responsible for the bricks their fellow Hebrews produce). Every missed quota costs them their own skin.
The sages of the Targumic tradition will later teach (Shemot Rabbah 5:20) that these foremen — precisely because they refused to pass the beatings downward — were later rewarded with appointment as the seventy elders who received prophecy at Sinai (Numbers 11:16-17). The bruises they absorbed in Egypt became the moral authority they carried in the wilderness.
The takeaway: the Exodus story keeps track of the middle managers. The Jewish imagination does not forget that some of the first heroes of the liberation were Hebrew foremen who chose to bleed rather than to pass the violence on. Their bruises became their ordination.