I have felt for some time now that employment is at best a tenuous existence in terms of providing for one's future. I feel this is so because I believe that corporate America has forsaken the employees, those who built the corporations, in favor of their own profit, and have therefore become too self-centered and too unethical.
This is because they not only think only about how they can get ahead, whether or not at the expense of other corporations or people around them, but they do this based upon the labor of others which they, as a whole, do not pay fairly for. (Notice that payment here is not always monetary although it often is.) They tend toward demanding more and more time, effort, intellect, vision, insight, and loyalty without returning in kind. For example, it is self-centered and unethical of a corporation to hire an employee to complete certain responsibilities, then to assign additional responsibilities on top of those previously agreed to, and yet to pay the same in money, benefits, recognition, and opportunity. This becomes a problem further in the United States today because corporations have a much better chance at getting the government to pass laws in their favor than private citizens do – they simply have more money to make it happen.
This problem becomes magnified in corporations that leverage knowledge, information, goods, or services that are provided to them from external sources under "gentleman's agreement" terms of non-monetary payment in some other means. One example of this is software companies that improperly use open source software. Note, there is nothing wrong with companies making money off of open source if they are able to do so. But since many corporations have the tendency to fail to pay fairly for things they receive, it is likely that they will continue this practice with something like open source, for example, taking credit for work they do not do.
How long will this system last before corporations become so greedy that they erode the foundations of society that support them? We are on this road today and that future is not necessarily far off.
