Corporations are dictatorships. The major shareholders and the board of directors make all of the important decisions which are passed down the chain of command to employees who have no say in this process. When working people, who are the vast majority, can take no part in the decision making process, it certainly ain't democracy.
If you think that I’m being hyperbolic than I suggest you take a look at Foxconn, the worlds second largest employer. Foxconn is a Taiwanese manufacturing firm that makes familiar products for companies like Apple, Dell, HP, Nintendo, Playstation, Nokia and Motorola. Foxconn has had enormous success in the past 15 years growing more than 50% per year and bringing in $40 billion in revenue making it “equal to that of it’s 10 biggest global rivals combined.” Yet behind their impressive growth is something more sinister.
At the center of [Foxconn CEO] Mr. Gou's empire is his walled Shenzhen facility, the Longhua Science & Technology Park, which covers about a square mile. Aside from customers, few outsiders set foot inside. A reporter visiting Longhua was barred from viewing protected areas or taking photographs of more than a few scenes
Wall Street Journal
Foxconn is not just a factory, but a city within a city where 270,000 workers don’t just work, but live, eat, sleep, and shop.
In addition to its dozens of assembly lines and dormitories, Longhua has a fire brigade, hospital and employee swimming pool, where Mr. Gou does early morning laps when he is there. Restaurants, banks, a grocery store and an Internet cafe line the company town's main drag. More than 500 monitors around the campus show exercise programs, worker-safety videos and company news produced by the in-house television network, Foxconn TV. Even the plant's manhole covers are stamped "Foxconn."
James Lee, a heavy-smoking former banker whom Mr. Gou tapped to run the plant in 1998, is Longhua's de facto mayor. Mr. Lee frets about how to provide more than 150,000 lunches every day in the 10 cavernous employee canteens... He oversees landscaping, uniform buying, dormitory building and hiring as many as 3,000 new workers a day during peak periods. His administration employs more than 1,000 security guards to keep order and prevent unauthorized visitors from sensitive areas.
How is this any different from a totalitarian dictatorship? What you can wear, what you can buy, where you can sleep, is all decided by one company which also owns the Tv station and everything that you interact with. Freedom of press is restricted and a security force maintains order in a walled city. There’s even a creepy personality cult built around CEO Terry Gou.
The founder’s personality permeates the site and company. A charismatic man who inspires intense loyalty among his lieutenants, Mr. Gou runs Hon Hai with the power of a warlord. On his right wrist he wears a beaded bracelet he got from a temple dedicated to Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongolian conqueror whom he calls a personal hero…
Around Longhua, his image can be seen in large framed photos of him with Chinese officials, and on the Gou biographies stacked in the factory book store's window.
"I always tell employees: The group's benefit is more important than your personal benefit," Mr. Gou says.
Company managers are expected to read and remember a document called "Gou's Quotations." (No. 133: "The important thing in any organization is leadership, not management. A leader must have the decisive courage to be a dictator for the common good.")
Here's the "common good" Terry Gou has provided to his workers
*12 hour shifts during which workers must stand and cannot talk to eachother
*Dormitory living quarters 8 or more to a room
*Wooden Planks for bedding
*1 day off every 2 weeks during peak demand
*Daily pay of $8
These horrible conditions have tragically led to a string of suicides over the past 2 years. Foxconn's response:
...managers at the factories ordered new staff to sign pledges that they would not attempt to kill themselves, according to researchers. And they were made to promise that if they did, their families would only seek the legal minimum in damages. Daily Mail
Foxconn might be an extreme example of the abuses of corporate capitalism, but it is all too common for Asians, Africans, and South Americans. Foxconn has no trouble getting a steady stream of job applicants because of how much worse the other employers are. This is the standard picture of Capitalism for billions of workers in the 3rd world.
And these kind of abuses were fairly common in late 19th century America. Company towns such as Pullman, IL were owned by one railroad tycoon owned everything, even the town church. These are the glory days that America's CEO's want to return to.
Not all companies are as bad as Foxconn (particularly in the 1st world), but companies that have decent labor conditions are at a competitive disadvantage. Equipment upgrades, marketing, and bargain pricing will result in more sales and/or lower internal costs. Good labor conditions increase internal costs and may actually decrease sales because the $ spent on workers must be made up somewhere else in the budget.
Why should capitalism continue to perpetuate itself after all of the disasters it has created? Why should most people have to do all the work while a small handful reap the rewards and give the orders?
After all, there is a better way. Workplace Democracy. Let workers own and run their own companies. There are several companies run on these principles which are very successful such as the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain with it's 100,000+ employees. People at democratic companies have better pay and working conditions, but most importantly they have a say on the job and have a connection to their work. Shouldn't everyone be entitled to workplace democracy? Isn't this just basic human rights? And can we really have a functioning democracy when our economy is based on dictatorship?
If we want Occupy Wall Street to become our Arab Spring, perhaps we should demand the Mubarak's in the board rooms step down and transition to democracy in the workplace.