Corporate Tyranny

An abusive corporate leader has the power to wreak extensive havoc on his or her employee's lives.  This could even extend to things outside of the workplace itself given how much of a person's schedule and activities typically have to be planned around work.  Almost no one works professionally under such a figure without desperation, spite, or apathy guiding them, and there is plenty in the American workplace, as well as that of other countries, that inspires desperation.  The phrase office politics somewhat references how businesses and organizations are like governmental bodies, just without any sort of inherent governing power outside of a business context.  Like a tyrannical government leader, tyrannical employers or managers can engage in philosophical idiocy, illicit discrimination, physical or sexual abuse, hypocrisy, deception, and manipulation of a dehumanizing kind.

However, employees might remain with a company where these things are happening because they need the pay or benefits, such as insurance, that they can only easily obtain through a job they despise or dread.  Again, desperation can keep people rooted in place although their workplace is destroying their physical or mental health, subjecting them to overt cruelty, or holding them back financially.  Business itself is not the issue.  Cultural infatuation with greed, abusing power, selfishness, and philosophical emotionalism are what contribute to the terrible state of the American workplace, and it is not as if simply starting or working for smaller businesses will necessarily thwart the tyranny that can so easily flourish in the workplace.

Small businesses can be just as suffocating as larger organizations or worse, for the company is smaller, high positions might be staffed with family members (which would not be a problem unless they are, for instance, incompetent or biased in favor of whatever the owner/leadership wants), and there might be even greater pressures to treat even heinous coworkers as if they are "family."  There is still potential for a small business employer or manager to be just as hypocritical, arrogant, selfish, cruel, generally irrationalistic as the wealthiest megacorporation C-suite executive, but the size makes a small business more confining and there might be more of a push to ignore offenses because rocking the boat could be more difficult to hide from the consumer base.  With small businesses, as with much larger business organizations, the power an individual worker has is dependent largely on factors beyond their control.

One of the best protections workers of various kinds can grant themselves is unions.  Other than a just government that regulates businesses in accordance with moral obligations rather than cultural norms, convenience, or greed, unions are the best measure to stand up to corporate tyranny because it is only together that every worker has more power in the business world than whatever their arbitrary connections, tenure, and skills give them, not that any of these things make someone invulnerable to corporate wrath.  Professional competence, past favor, and dedication to a company or leader will not stop an irrationalistic employer from changing their whims and acting on those whims.  No matter how much a non-rationalist boss appears to show a worker favor, they might overwork them, cut their hours, slander them, or fire them the moment it becomes convenient.

This is not some logically necessary trait of being a business leader, of course, and one employer being oppressive does not mean another one will or that they cannot change for the better.  It is just that there is a great deal of vulnerability on the part of many workers, and that vulnerability is amplified significantly in most businesses unless there is a collective of workers to dissuade an egoistic corporate tyrant.  No matter its size, a company is like a government, and any government could plunge its subjects into oppressive treatment if only the wrong person takes power.  Unfortunately, it has been very easy for irrationalistic, selfish men and women to take corporate power, and though it might not be easy to establish them, more unionization is indeed one of the best things workers could pursue for the sake of job security, livable compensation, and healthy working conditions.