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Edited on Sat Oct-07-06 06:46 AM by Caution
I've worked for one of the largest privately held companies and it was just like when i worked for a large corporation. For the past 10 years i have worked solely in startups, both corporate and privately-held, and size is the key factor. When upper level management isn't exposed to the workforce on a regular basis they start to view people differently.
It's not that people don't complain, it's that there is no one to complain to. How do you bring a complaint to someone who has actual decision making ability when that person is 8 levels up the management ladder and across the country?
I work in a corporation now, spoke to the CEO yesterday about something. There is a notion that CEOs are these rich, unapproachable monsters when MOST CEOs are in charge of very small companies and aren't rich at all. This is because most companies are actually quite small and depend upon their investors for money in the early stages.
Also I think you are misunderstanding corporate vs publicly-traded. This is another issue entirely, particularly for large corporations which are publicly traded. The direction of companies like this are even more dependent upon unapproachable leadership who answer to the shareholders, which now, thanks to 401k and hedge funds tend to be large institutional holders, who themselves are ONLY answerable to share-holders and those shareholders are often millions of people, all with small stakes. It's a difficult situation to rectify, since these funds are what most middle class americans now depend upon for retirement.
Upper management need to be more in touch with their workforce, they need to be accountable for the well-being of their workforce. This means a living wage, a return of reitement benefits, strict rules governing investment of retirement back into the parent company (Enron was the biggest violater of retirement investment back into itself), institutional shareholders must be strictly regulated to prevent them from dictating poor management policies towards a workforce.
All of these things will be painful for the economy and the market to bear, so it will be a slow process, and it will require real governmental leadership. It will also require moving away from neo-liberalism (in an economic sense) and a movement more towards a well-regulated economy.
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