Pretty much spot on. The thing is there were major changes going on in the 50's. Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex, but I don't think he knew how deep it went. Serling was a brilliant guy and saw this, too. This screenplay was a warning disguised as entertainment. There are many large corporations today that have a dynasty and most mirror your Romney example. Things like mass layoffs are common, but so are the mind games to make salaried people quit instead of firing. I think anyone that has worked at the corporate level has seen this. I've tried to study this and the common denominator seems to be the majority acquisition of large cap corporations by nameless "Institutional Investors". Look at the stock of any publicly held company and if the institutional ownership >50% you will see this unspoken culture. People blame the corporations, but it's really the people that own the corporation that are to blame - CEOs will happily shoulder it, that's what they get paid to do, but it's responsibility without authority. The authority going to the institutions, (whoever they really are). You only have to listen to quarterly conference calls and every once in a while they let it slip who's really in charge. I heard it a lot in 2008 when corporations were struggling to change, but weren't allowed to. In fact, they were made to do things they didn't want. The retail expansion of multiple seemingly separate corporations into Canada is a good example. Did all the different CEO's of these corporations all wake up one morning with the same idea? Contrary to popular belief these corporate guys aren't idiots. Target knew from the git go that opening up hundreds of stores in Canada wouldn't work, but it wasn't up to them.
Public corporations aren't all bad. You just have to look at their stock sheet and see how much is institutional. Legally, the percentage has to be shown, but not ownership, (shares like through 401k are so small it's hardly worth mentioning). If the company is <30% held by institutionals, probably a pretty good place to work.
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mathmaniac
8 years ago
Focusing on the corporation's stock's value is a good place to start. No one cares if you create a more humane workplace as long as the stock price suffers. The stockholders won't like it. Whether they are people with a small stake or an institutions. In fact, people who have stock in a company as part of their retirement plan (whether as separate shares or as part of a mutual fund) are going to be even more sensitive and want the bottom line to be better, no matter what it takes.
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