Friday, January 28, 2005

The Corporation "Today, it is a vivid, dramatic and pervasive presence in all our lives. Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today's dominant institution. But history humbles dominant institutions. All have been crushed, belittled or absorbed into some new order. The corporation is unlikely to be the first to defy history." Today it is not unusual for people to work sixty hours or more just to get their jobs done. Even as unemployment rates in many areas get to historic lows, there seems to more and more power for the employer and less for the employee. While I recently read about a number of corporations working together to set up healthcare plans for temporary and part time employees, I know from experience this is just another way for companies to bind their employees to them. Your retirement savings, your healthcare, even how you are perceived become linked to the corporation where you work. As corporations feel the pressure of the global economy, the pressure to cut costs becomes intense because prices are almost impossible to raise. While some corporations really try to make a great place for people to work until they are ready to retire, there are plenty of corporations that are very clever are ridding themselves of older, more experience and expensive employees. Unfortunately many American corporations are so enthralled with short term gain that the loss of knowledge from their older workers is a price they are willing to pay if it saves some short term payroll dollars. Many corporations have become so adept at using the law for their own ends that employees have few real rights. The "at will[per thou] employee contracts that are forced on employees literally let corporations do what they want. As the top few people at some corporations become rich beyond belief, many workers are not rewarded fairly for their efforts. It is clear that the government in the United States is unlikely to impose additional regulations on corporations to redress the imbalance in power between the rights of the individual and the power of the corporation. It is imperative that we begin to debate how to reform corporate power to build a country where fairness to the individual is balanced with the need to compete in a global economy. For more thoughts see my other weblog View From The Mountain 6:00:53 PM    comment []