How does your company treat its employees? [poll]

There's an interesting story on Newsweek's website this week: Quitting Time, about how many people in the workforce are itching to leave their jobs because so many are not being treated well by their companies.

As hiring picks up, there are signs a different group is angling to cash in: beleaguered employees who've held onto their jobs but feel overworked and underpaid. Some are beginning to lay plans for an escape. In the first quarter of 2004, 4.2 million people posted their resumes on Monster, the online job board, up 44 percent from a year earlier; this year "confidential" postings (usually made by people trying to hide job hunting from their boss) are up 13 percent. At the Five O'Clock Club, a New York-based career-counseling firm, half of new clients already have a job but are looking for a new one; last year most new members were unemployed. In Fresno, Calif., more than half of the prospective clients calling resume writer Susan Whitcomb are employed job hunters, up from 20 percent last year. In surveys, many workers vow they'll change jobs as more firms start hiring. "People are very loosely tethered to their laptops, and at any moment, with the right phone call, they could be lured away," says Sibson Consulting's Peter LeBlanc, who expects turnover rates to double in the next 12 months.

That's largely because companies spent the past few years squeezing more and more work out of ever-smaller staffs, and many workers aren't happy about it. Those productivity numbers Alan Greenspan celebrates don't sound so nifty to folks who feel like they're doing three jobs to make them possible. But amid nonstop downsizing, who could complain about it? "Employees are wrung out right now--it's been a sausage grinder the last four years," says Mark Oldman of the employment-research firm Vault Inc.

Here's the thing that gets me: there is NOTHING preventing these companies from treating their employees well. It seems to me that many companies treat their lower-ranking employees like widgets because they can. What the hell is so hard about treating human beings like human beings?

I suspect this is more of a problem with corporations that with small businsesses. There seems to be something inherently dehumanizing about corporations. If there are any senior executives or department managers out there, I'd like to hear any comments you might have about this.