Before I even begin, kleinbl00, your Amazon story that you link. You ask the question "What company is best leveraged to bring back The Company Store Business Model in the next decade or so" and I think that article is the start of it. I thought private buses for Google, Apple, etc. was bad.

You know, nil, I agree with you whole heartedly in spirit here. I remember a really good picnic I went to a few years back, where I met a very wonderful lady who happened to be a social worker, and one of her main jobs was helping people recovering from substance abuse find volunteer work. It was super helpful for them for a variety of reasons, from the regular routine helping to keep them fall off the wagon, to building marketable skills and good habits for reliability, to, and this part is most important, building a sense of self confidence and worth.

That said, I'm so inline with what you said that I don't have much to add, other than I think it's socially criminal that employers are doing what they can to disempower the workforce. Good, meaningful work really does so much to lift the spirit and everything from depressing wages to creating hostile/unsafe/depressing workplaces gets in the way of that.