How many work for a corporation?

[DaveJ]

Just wondering. I was recently fortunate enough to leave a corporation and get a job with a privately owned business. I feel so much better now. I feel that corporate control of America is just as bad as the Iraq situation.

I don't want to offend anyone, but I think corporations only hire sheep who never complain. This is the most important method to their insidious takeover.

Few can detect what is happening because those who are enslaved become mute in the process. I know that corporations were not originally intended to enslave humanity but that's what they are doing now with the enthusiastic vigor of *Co. Am I making sense? Over lives outside work seem free but the majority of our productive lives are during work hours, unfortunately -- that's where they control us and that's where the problem lies... does anyone agree with this?

[rwenos]

1. Worked for Several

I was never a good fit with a big corporation. I was always criticized for thinking too independently, for "not being a team player," for nonconformity, for whatever.

Big corporations are a lousy work environment. They try to degrade all the employees, so they will think "I need this job, because I will never find a better one."

Working for a big corporation sucks.

[DaveJ]

2. Whew, that's a relief...

I thought I was just crazy for a second.

When I worked for a corporation I had the impression that I had no opportunity whatsoever to make anything of my life regardless of how hard I tried.

When I mentioned the work I was doing at home to start my own business they treated me like it was a joke.

The way they belittle people and make them feel so insignificant is totally inhumane. My point is, that THIS is the primary problem today. If anything, the War on Terrorism is just a distraction to cover up the corporate takeover of America... the fact that people are now being treated like children, or at best like modularized working units.

It is not right for people to be treated this way. It is, seriously, not the exact same thing, but similar to some form of slavery. Again, the main problem is that corporate employees are paid to keep silent and never complain right down to the bottom. We never hear a peep from them.

[acmejack]

10. You are right!

I worked for several myself, in varying capacities from management to worker bee, in descending order. I was downwardly mobile. I learned about the vicious knife fighting at the junior levels under Jack Welch, if you didn't watch your back at GE. I learned about outsourcing firsthand during the implementation of the wonderful "Dell Model" at Dell.

In fairness, GE was a great place to work until Jack Welch took over and "fixed" the place. That is what made him "America's best CEO", or so all the magazine covers he was pictured on proclaimed!

[TomInTib]

3. Not me

I would rather go diving in a dumpster

than to be a prisoner

in a tall building

[Mythsaje]

4. I got laid off from my corporate job...

Now I'm working for a medical non-profit. A much better fit.

[AndyTiedye]

5. I Work For a Corporation…

…that makes the routers that run the Internet.
The stuff I do makes it harder for others to spy on Internet traffic
and harder for them to steal someone else's identity on the net.

I feel pretty good about that.

[RebelOne]

6. I am employed by a very large media corporation

and I am quite happy at my job. This company treats its employees extremely well and I have no complaints.

[tpsbmam]

7. Wow.....

I try to stay out of the discussions that end up with people stomping on each other but I just had to jump in. I'd be offended if I worked for a big corporation. I totally get what you're saying and there's some truth to it -- corporations for the most part don't want people who are going to question their policies or challenge anything.

But to categorize the people who work for corporations as "sheep" is pretty unfair and a huge generalization in my opinion.

Let me give you an example. One of my many friends who worked for a huge corporation (annual revenue about $75 billion; she JUST retired) was very happy with her job. She's bright, fun, personable, etc etc -- just a great person. She grew up in utter poverty in the South during the time when her African American skin caused her to be on the receiving end of American apartheid. And believe me, even in NY City discrimination didn't end -- we were together many times when I witnessed it myself. She's one of the most elegant people I know and we literally got to the point sometimes when I'd go stand in the street with my white skin showing to hail a cab while she'd stand on the sidewalk looking like she wasn't with me -- we'd get a cab 10 times faster. How pathetic is that.....and how much did it break my heart for my fabulous friend? Growing up she was called every racist name you can imagine, attended a segregated school when she could get there at all (she really did have to walk miles to school), and was poor enough that the family "dirt farm" had to feed 13 children -- believe me, they were poor and during the roughest times, hungry.

Despite all of that, she managed to graduate from high school. She started out working in a factory but wanted more. She went to secretarial school at night and then worked very successfully through a series of jobs. As I said, she has amazing qualities as a person and professional. She was eventually hired by a big corporation that didn't give a damn that she didn't have a college degree -- they recognized her sterling qualities and hired her. She ended up being the manager for her department with many people working under her that had graduate degrees. She's astute and one of the most diplomatically savvy people I know. She was able to challenge policies in a way that won her friends and admirers rather than getting her fired.

Believe me, she ain't no sheep. And neither are most of the people I know who work for big corporations. Yeah, there are a few sheep among them and I do have a biased sample here because "sheep" aren't likely to be my friends.

People do what they have to do -- they have responsibilities and most of my friends meet their responsibilities head on. Most of them decided what they wanted to "be" when they were young -- some stuck with it, others switched into other fields. But sheep? Naaaaaaaaaah!

[Herman Munster]

8. yeah i know what you are saying

I feel that way working for the federal government. Basically, I'm just a little cog in the wheel and do what I'm told because my boss says so and my boss does what he's told from his boss and so on. We many times have no clue who or why we do what we do, we just do.

But the job security, hours, benefits, and money for the hours I work are great. I could get paid a lot more than working for the government, but I would also have to give up my 4 weeks of vacation and compressed schedule flexed time off. One of the biggest benefit I get is being able to make an 80 hour pay period into 9 days instead of 10, so I can get every other Friday off. The biggest benefit is the job security. It is such an administrative headache to fire an employee, and employees get so many appeal rights that the job security is unmatched. You know that as long as you do your job adequately and don't come to work drunk or sleep all day, you have a job for life. There can be some RIF's (reduction in force) if budgets get cut but that happens very rarely now. Half of the government will retire within the next 5 years, so lots of opportunities for younger employees to move up and get promoted.

Add in a pension that will never be bankrupt (government can just get into more debt or print more money). and health benefits after retirement for life.....well those two things alone will be worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars into the future.

So I pretty much dislike what I do, but I don't do much of it, and I haven't been able to find any job that gives me these benefits with this much time off and job security. I was out of work almost a year after graduating college and vowed to myself, NEVER AGAIN.

Life is a compromise. Sometimes you just got to work for the big organizations to be able to do other things.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

9. .

eom

[Caution]

11. This depends on size, not private/corporate

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.