If you had to identify the top three things (in terms of impact) that could be changed (albeit with difficulty) to reduce the chances of employees being stuffed into cannons, what would they be?

My three would be:

1. Relatively weak labor protections in the USA.

2. The fiduciary requirement to maximize shareholder value. Why not allow a company to define its own metric, such as a blend of profit along with employee treatment (or others, within some notion of reasonableness*), make this metric public, provide some sort of accounting and accountability for it, and let shareholders adjust accordingly.

3. The quarterly reporting of public companies. This makes long-term planning and investment much harder.

* I haven't studied this very broadly. I'm familiar with the Triple Bottom Line and B-Corporations.