The corporation exists solely at the sufferance of the society that grants it its charter. Someday maybe we'll remember this instead of throwing our hands up in the air and giving up.
The world is not black and white, no matter how naive folks here believe it to be.
The world is not black-and-white. This is. I do not understand, Steinbeck notwithstanding, the steadfast desire to take the minimal power of the worker out of the worker's hands.
It seems that you're advocating a 'punishment as deterrent' strategy for society along the lines of capital punishment. "If you violate the rules even slightly, you will be executed." Is that a good strategy for encouraging lawfulness while preserving efficacy? And is law the perfect (or the best) mechanism for encoding moral behavior?
It determines the values of your society. Fuck with the powerless at your own, extreme risk. If your values are more important than your spreadsheets, then the violation of the rights of the weak must take precedence. And, for me, it does; I'm proud to say that I've been pretty on-point about hewing to that in my adult life, even when balancing managerial responsibilities to an employer.
We can argue about the level of impact that must be assessed; I'll bend on something like the revocation of a charter for this (though there are plenty of corporate crimes for which it's a fair response). But suppression of worker rights should involve a very, very harsh penalty that makes the company not simply think twice from, but recoil in utter fear about, doing so again. (Perhaps a personal consequence to the actor involved; I don't really believe in the fictional person of the corporation and I'm okay with holding its agents responsible for its bad behaviors.)
> It seems that you're advocating a 'punishment as deterrent' strategy for society along the lines of capital punishment.
Essentially, yes, but there's a multiplier involved that makes this comparison fuzzy. Organizations, which are not people, should be held to significantly higher standards of moral rectitude than any individual due to their geometrically (even exponentially?) greater power and ability to impact others. Impacts that would be "small" on the individual scale are seismic at Google-scale, and the punishments must reflect this.
I think there are better strategies for encouraging lawfulness (and, more important, ethical behavior) at the individual scale, and even at the societal level. But the modern corporation's entire schtick is being above that society--look how many useful idiots speak positively of the "amorality" of a corporation. If an appeal to the better nature of which people celebrate its non-existence, I'm okay with giving fear a go. I mean, we already live in the cyberpunk dystopia of the eighties, minus the mohawks and shoulderpads--at this point, inaction is acceptance.